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Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

maggieappleton.com

61–70 of 466 posts

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#61
post #27

>Yegge is leaning into the true definition of vibecoding with this project: “It is 100% vibecoded. I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to.” I don't get it. Even with a very good understanding of what type of work I am doing and a prebuilt knowledge of the code, even for very well specced problem. Claude code etc. just plain fail or use sloppy code. How do these industry figures claim they see no part of a 225K…

This is also my experience. Everything I’ve ever tried to vibe code has ended up with off-by-one errors, logic errors, repeated instances of incorrect assumptions etc. Sometimes they appear to work at first, but, still, they have errors like this in them that are often immediately obvious on code review and would definitely show up in anything more than very light real world use. They _can_ usually be manually tidied…

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, see if you find any code smells, bad architecture, scalability problems that will pop up, untestable code, or anything else falling outside of modern coding best practices Agent 1 - Here's the code review for your changes, please fix Agent 2 - Do another review Agent 1 - Here's the code review for your changes, please fix

Repeat until testable, maybe throw in a full codebase review instead of just the feature.

Agent 1 - Code looks good, start writing unit tests, go step by step, let's walk through everything, etc. etc. etc.

Then update your .md directive files to tell the agents how to test.

Voila, you have an llm agent loop that will write decent code and get features out the door.

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#62

>Yegge is leaning into the true definition of vibecoding with this project: “It is 100% vibecoded. I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to.” I don't get it. Even with a very good understanding of what type of work I am doing and a prebuilt knowledge of the code, even for very well specced problem. Claude code etc. just plain fail or use sloppy code. How do these industry figures claim they see no part of a 225K…

It's unintuitive, but having an llm verification loop like a code reviewer works impeccably well, you can even create dedicated agents to check for specific problem areas like poor error handling.

This isn't about anthropomorphism, it's context engineering. By breaking things into more agents, you get more focused context windows.

I believe gas town has some review process built in, but my comment is more to address the idea that it's all slop.

As an aside, Opus 4.5 is the first model I used that most of the time doesn't produce much slop, in case you haven't tried it. Still produces some slop, but not much human required for building things (it's mostly higher level and architectural things they need guidance on).

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The compiler is deterministic and the translation does not lose semantics. The meaning of your code is an exact reflection of what is produced.

We can tell you weren't around for the advent of compilers. To be fair, neither was I since the UNIX c compiler came out in '68 and was by far not the first compiler. Modern comilers you can make that claim about, but early compilers weren't.

Which early compilers were nondeterministic?

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#65
post #54

>Yegge is leaning into the true definition of vibecoding with this project: “It is 100% vibecoded. I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to.” I don't get it. Even with a very good understanding of what type of work I am doing and a prebuilt knowledge of the code, even for very well specced problem. Claude code etc. just plain fail or use sloppy code. How do these industry figures claim they see no part of a 225K…

I don't get you guys that are getting such bad results. Are you guys just trying to one shot stuff? Are you not using agents to iterate on things? Are you not putting agents against each other (have one code, one critique/test the code, and put them in a loop)? I still look at the code that's produced, I'm not THAT far down the "vibe coding" path that I'm trusting everything being produced, but I get phenomenal resul…

I have some success but by the time I'm done I'm often not sure if I saved any time.

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#66
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The secret is that it doesn't work. I have 100% vibecoded software that I now use instead of commercial implementation that cost me almost 200 usd a month (tool for radiology dictation and report generation).

And yet I notice you haven't mentioned publishing it and undercutting the market. You could make a lot of money out-competing the existing option if what you produced was production-grade software. I'm guessing the actual case is that you only needed a small subset of the functionality of the paid software, and the LLM stitched together a rough unpolished proof-of-concept that handled your exact specific use case. Wh…

>The world still needs real engineers to make real software that is suitable for the needs of many, and this doesn't replace that.

I think azan_ is demonstrating that shipping products 'suitable for the needs of many' is going to have to compete with 'slopping software for the needs of one'.

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#67
post #52

I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment. It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end. And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and h…

> If you read Steve's writeup Personally I got about 3 paragraphs into what seemed like a twelve-page fevered dream and filed it under "not for me yet".

> And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and harumph at it for being Unprofessional and Not Serious and Not Ready For Production.

Exactly!

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#68

I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment. It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end. And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and h…

> I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town.

Fear over what it means if it works.

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#69

Gas Town has a very clear "mad scientist/performance art" sort of thing going on, and I love that. It's taking a premise way past its logical conclusion, and I think that's fun to watch. I haven't seen anything to suggest that Yegge is proposing it as a serious tool for serious work, so why all the hate?

It’s doesn’t matter what Yegge means by it. Other folks are taking it seriously.

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#70

I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment. It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end. And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and h…

Its because people are treating the experiment like a serious path forward for their business.
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