Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

steve-yegge.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 183 posts

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#51

Post by Quarrelsome »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #10

> But no need to wait. At a high level, Gas City is the answer to all your problems. Ha! At least, for certain classes of problem, such as, “How can I bring AI into my company and pass an audit trail,” The important audit at my company is conducted by the FDA. I have a feeling when they ask what processes we followed to mitigate any user harm that could be caused by software changes that "I told an AI-mayor in the fo…

I did an induction at some ISO certified company some years back, reading their docs. A good 50% of them contained significant content that basically read:

> the thing must be in the place where it should be

With no further information e.g. what place, where, how, when, who facilitates that?

> the person who facilitates it, is the person who facilitates it.

Yea thanks. So their ISO accredited process was basically no process. Would have been way better with a talking fox.

So I feel like humans are capable of just as bad. I'd be interested in what answer the Fox could spit out and I kinda wonder where it might fit on the bell curve of all non Gas-Town "auditable" processes. I'm all for skepticism but I feel like it would be more tangible if we instead criticised the response instead of just conjuring it as "definitely awful" because it happens to be on top of a generated stack.

I mean: I don't want it to work, but maybe we're not as good as we think we are, or the stuff we rate as super important is actually way less important with a generated context. As much as I love good code, the thought that gnaws at the back of my head is the truism that some of the most profitable code in history has been some of the "worst" code (e.g. MySpace's janky code base ontop of ColdFusion or Twitter's "Fail Whale" era).

So I'm happy that someone is exploring this space in an open way. I'm just glad I'm not the one finding that out with my face first.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#52

Post by tom_ »

peddling-brink wrote: post #33
pianopatrick wrote: post #23

I searched on google about the cost of running Gas Town. The Gemini AI response claimed Gas town costs $100 / hour and can spit out 4000 lines of code per hour, so Gas Town costs 2.5 cents per line of code. I tried tracking down where those numbers came from and the sources were a bit sketchy. Can anybody who has used Gas Town confirm those numbers, or report their personal numbers?

Using regular Claude code I can generate 4k lines an hour. Using some bash I can generate 4k lines of code per second. Lines of code per hour is a bad metric. Can it solve a problem using production quality code that doesn’t take four times as long to review? That sounds like something I would pay $100 for.

I think the point is that we are given no real idea at all, not even some ballpark figures, about how much actual money actually needs to be spent in order to run Gas Town. The original article had some handwavy stuff about how it cost An Awful Lot, but no actual numbers.

Cost per line of code is not an amazing metric, but at least it's an attempt to come up with a figure.

(I would also be interested to find out how much it costs to run...)

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#53

Post by RugnirViking »

_pdp_ wrote: post #36
mmastrac wrote: post #5

Serious question - there's a lot of fluff talking about Gas Town, but has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting? At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.

If the post does not have any use-cases proving value then perhaps this is something yet to be validated, i.e. the burden on the users, not the creators.

In an era where creating such libraries is much cheaper than validating that they're useful or work, yeah you really should validate it before you expect someone to use it. Nobody is going around trying out every slop project they see, they'd be wasting hours and hours for no gain at all.

This all being said, I do find the idea interesting, but heeded it's advice when it said it's hideously expensive and risky to use. So yes, I do want someone braver, richer, and stupider than me to take the first leap

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#55

Post by troupo »

moomin wrote: post #54
avaer wrote: post #2

TBH this post still reads like a clown show.

Read some of his earlier stuff. He’s a very informal writer, but he’s a damn good one with good ideas.

No. He used to be good with ideas. Now he's drinking too much of his own poison. His blog posts are bloviated monstrosities incapable of coherently describing the very trivial ideas contained in them.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#56

Post by cdrnsf »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #48
cdrnsf wrote: post #34

An apt name for something doing it's part to spike energy consumption and accelerate the climate crisis.

The climate crisis is primarily a consequence of fossil fuels, not necessarily energy demand. I feel like its a poor conflation, despite it possibly being a truism depending on where the datacentre is based and what power source feeds it.

If we're keeping gas and coal plants online to power this or using gas generators to power data centers, I'd consider that a wasteful contributing factor.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#57

Post by cma »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #10

> But no need to wait. At a high level, Gas City is the answer to all your problems. Ha! At least, for certain classes of problem, such as, “How can I bring AI into my company and pass an audit trail,” The important audit at my company is conducted by the FDA. I have a feeling when they ask what processes we followed to mitigate any user harm that could be caused by software changes that "I told an AI-mayor in the fo…

> The important audit at my company is conducted by [Trump's second term] FDA.

Could work

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#58

Post by rspeele »

sailingparrot wrote: post #43

Gas Town really feels not just vibe coded but also vibe designed. I looked into it, to see whether multi agent setups really made a difference, the entire design philosophy feels like it was « let’s add one more layer of agent and surely this time it will work » about 10 times in a row. So now you have agents of type mayor, polecats, witnesses, deacons, dogs etc plus a slew of Unneeded constructs with incomprehensibl…

> Ended up building my own thing that is 10x simpler, just a simple main agent you talk to, that can dispatch subagents, they all communicate, wake each other up and keep track of work through a simple CLI. No « refinery » or « wasteland » or « molecule » or « convoys » or « deacons » or …

You won't get 10k stars and a blog post out of that. Obviously you need some Stoats who have Conferences with the Stump Lord to determine whether they are needed at the Silo or the Bilge. They'll then regroup at the appropriate Decision Epicenter and delegate to the Weasels and Chipmunks who actually do the coding (antiquated term) in the Salt Mine.

The Stump Lord is an owl.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#59

Post by munificent »

> I’ve been saying since last year that by the end of 2026, people will be mostly programming by talking to a face. There’s absolutely NO reason to type with the Mayor. You should be able to chat with them like a person. You’ll have a cartoon fox there onscreen, in costume, building and managing your production software, and showing you pretty status updates whenever you ask for one. This is the end state for IDEs.

This is a desirable end state for highly social but perhaps slightly sociopathic extroverts who want to spend all day talking even though they aren't talking to a person.

For anyone else, it's hard to imagine considering that a desirable way to spend eight hours a day.

Post reply on HN