Although bright ideas may be found in this post, anthropomorphisms of LLM agents turns me away from reading.
Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale
411–420 of 466 posts
Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
Links to Steve's writeup for Gas Town for those who don't have them yet: [Medium post]: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d... [HN Discussion]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46458936
And https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-... where you can read about its author scamming people
I don't understand what's "scammy" about a rugpull. What did the "investors" expect? That lolcoin would become a cash flow positive business and disburse dividends?
Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn't. Remember the days when people experimented with and talked about things that werent LLMs? I used to go to a lot of industry events and I really enjoyed hearing about the diversity of different things people worked on both as a hobby and at work.…
> I used to go to a lot of industry events and I really enjoyed hearing about the diversity of different things people worked on both as a hobby and at work. I go to tech meetups regularly. The speed at which any conversation end up on the topic of AI is extremely grating to me. No more discussions about interesting problems and creative solutions that people come up with. It's all just AI, agentic, vibe code. At wha…
It's incredible the change over the last few years even on the hardware side. I go to the supercomputing.org conference annually and saw folks advertising "AI power distribution units". There used to be a lot of neat innovation, and now every last thing has to have "AI" in the title, it's infuriating
Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale
#414Steve Yegge> But I’ve already started to get strange offers, from people sniffing around early rumors of Gas Town, to pay me to sit at home and be myself: I get to work on Beads and Gas Town, and just have to write a nice blog post or go to a conference or workshop once in a while. I have three such offers right now. It’s almost surreal.
It's all performance art! At the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 1988, Lucian Freud’s model Leigh Bowery used to get paid to sit on an Empire divan behind a one way mirror and just relax, preen, perch, pose, recline, and do his thing for hours on end, while people paid good money to watch him. Great work if you can get it!
Bob Nickas on Leigh Bowery:
https://www.artforum.com/columns/bob-nickas-on-leigh-bowery-...
>“IT WAS A BIT LIKE GOING to the zoo and watching Guy the Gorilla in drag.” That’s how Cerith Wyn Evans recalls Leigh Bowery’s weeklong London performance at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 1988. Bowery, each day in a different costume of his own design, appeared behind a one-way mirror, with an Empire divan on which to perch, pose, or recline. Visitors saw him, but he saw only himself, performed for his own reflection. Footage of the event figures prominently in The Legend of Leigh Bowery (2002), Charles Atlas’s recently unveiled documentary, and the spooky, otherworldly spell that Bowery casts is undeniable. The zoo reference nails it. With rivulets of iridescent purple glue spilled like blood from the top of his shaved head and a silky lime feathered bodice, Bowery appears to be an ostrich in human form. Black-spotted faux fur covering his face and upper body, he is transformed into an alien snow leopard. Bowery’s uncanny ability to visually disorient the senses remains unmatched, his reinvention of costume as sculpture groundbreaking. From the tripped-out tribalism of Forcefield and the psychedelic erotics of Christian Holstad to the work of designers such as Rei Kawakubo and Alexander McQueen, his vocabulary, punctuated by about a million sequins, resonates to this day.
Leigh Bowery at d'Offay:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGRvjTiJBpI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNlGKUP2F9w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly6nKBdHZ34
Love! Love! Love!
Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale
#415Yegge is just running arbitrage on an information gap. It's the same chasm that all the AI vendors are exploiting: the gap between people who have some idea what is going on and the vast mass of people who don't but are addicted to excitement or fear of the future. Yegge is being fake-playful about it but if you have read any of his other writing, this tracks. None of it is to be taken very seriously because he value…
I wonder if he's being paid. I detected a noticeable uptick in posts on reddit bragging AI coding in the last month which fit the pattern of other opinion shaping astroturfing projects ive seen before. If Claude came to me with a bundle of cash and tokens to encourage me to keep the AI coding hype train going I'd also go heavy on the excitability, experimental attitude, humor and irreverence. I'd also leave a mountai…
He got a cool 50k from some memecoin for this
Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it sounds like "you're holding it wrong" Like, why are you manually tidying and fixing things? The first pass is never perfect. Maybe the functionality is there but the code is spaghetti or untestable. Have another agent review and feed that review back into the original agent that built out the code. Keep iterating like that. My usual workflow: Agent 1 - Build feature Agent 2 - Review these parts of the code,…
I'm not trying to be rude here at all but are you manually verifying any of that? When I've had LLMs write unit tests they are quick to write pointless unit tests that seem impressive "2123/2123 tests passed!" but in reality it's testing mostly nothing of value. And that's when they aren't bypassing commit checks or just commenting out tests or saying "I fixed it all" while multiple tests are broken. Maybe I need a s…
Those kinds of errors were super common 4-6 months ago, but LLM quality moves fast. Nowadays I don't see these very often at all. Two things that make a huge difference: work on writing a spec first. github.speckit, GSD, BMAD, whatever tool you like can help with this. Do several passes on the spec to refine it and focus on the key ideas.
Now that you have a spec, task it out, but tell the LLM to write the tests first (like Test-Driven Development, but without all the formalisms). This forces the LLM to focus on the desired behavior instead of the algorithms. Be sure to focus on tests that focus on real behavior: client apis doing the right error handling when you get bad input, handling tricky cases, etc. Tell the system not to write 'struct' tests - checking that getters/setters work isn't interesting or useful.
Then you implement 1-3 tasks at a time, getting the tests to pass. The rules prevent disabling tests, commenting out tests, and, most importantly, changing the behavior of the tests. Doesn't use a lot of context, little to no hallucinating, and easily measurable progress.
Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like it was doing what you're saying about 4-6 months ago. Especially the commenting out tests. Not always but I'd have to do more things step by step and keep the llm on track. Now though, the last 3-4 months, it's writing decent unit tests without much hand holding or refactors.
Hmm, my last experience was within the last 2 months but I'm trying not to write it off as "this sucked and will always suck", that's the #1 reason I keep testing and playing with these things, the capabilities are increasing quickly and what did/didn't work last week (especially "last model") might work this week. I'll keep testing it but that just hasn't been my experience, I sincerely hope that changes because an…
I discussed approaches in my earlier reply. But what you are saying now makes me think you are having problems with too much context. Pare down your CLAUDE.md massively and never let you context usage get over 60-65%. And tell CLAUDE not to commit anything without explicit instructions from you (unless you are working in a branch/worktree and are willing to throw it all away).
Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale
#418>while Yegge made lots of his own ornate, zoopmorphic [sic] diagrams of Gas Town’s architecture and workflows, they are unhelpful. Primarily because they were made entirely by Gemini’s Nano Banana. And while Nano Banana is state-of-the-art at making diagrams, generative AI systems are still really shit at making illustrative diagrams. They are very hard to decipher, filled with cluttered details, have arrows pointing…
I generally am a fan of polished writing, but I do believe that there's room for quickly fired experimental stuff, and quite enjoyed this piece. With the speed he was going, I wouldn't be surprised if the system architecture actually changed in between subsequent sections of the post. It's not a scientific article, but just a cross-country runner at the top of his game giving us a quick update without breaking his st…
Sure. The critique is with his incoherently labeled images, not his prose or passion project.
If LLMs can't produce readable technical diagrams ("Figure n"), avoid them for diagramming.
Don't insult the reader with strings like Oarity, Ed3e Csess, Ouclstnoc, relinemen, ressore Critieal, Foll Throughput, Witnese/Refin, ecstate ta Mayor, and Hsoide Fulures Stafey Fen.
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*X3z...
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*7Cr...
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*blw...
Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is still an evil scammer scamming people. In the same way signposting and credibly warning "I murder people" does not make ok to murder people.
Do you have the same attitude towards all forms of gambling?
Yegge wrote in his blog post (viewed by many who ended up buying in) that it is an investment and that he wishes the investors will become "filthy rich". He wrote the post as an introduction to the concept of BAGS for an audience that is unfamiliar with it. He onboarded people to the platform and to his pump and dump scheme (in which he pumped, and dumped, then announced he's walking away from it).
You left out that part of the post and only mentioned the disclaimer he added at the top after he got pushback on his messaging. Are you influenced by his celebrity?
Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
I appreciate your earnest Harumph, kind cross-armed sir! I take it you never played The Sims? The simulation madness ship sailed 26 years ago, and made well over $5 billion in revenue for Maxis/EA (as of 2019), and that's if you don't even count SimCity that shipped in 1986! ;) The Sims Franchise Has Made Over $5 Billion In Revenue (Published Oct 30, 2019): https://www.thegamer.com/the-sims-franchise-revenue-over-5-b…
Stop. Seek help.
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