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Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

steve-yegge.medium.com

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

#61

Post by pianopatrick »

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.

Well, yes ideally we would eventually also have metrics about error rates and reject rates. Like ideally at some point someone could do a study of "for every 100 PRs Gas Town generates, how many are accepted after code review and how many are rejected" or "for every 100 lines of code Gas Town generates, how many coding errors are detected by human reviewers".

Unfortunately I think things are moving so fast that by the time such a study was done, we would already be on to newer models and newer versions of gas town.

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

#62

Post by Quarrelsome »

cdrnsf wrote: post #56
Quarrelsome wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

but we could also argue that not investing in extra non-fossil fuel capacity is the issue here. OR not investing in more research on super conductors and/or storage. Iceland could possibly export considerable amounts of renewable energy if we licked those problems.

I mean, under the same logic couldn't we kinda argue that TV has ruined the planet? A lot of energy for something of debatable physical value. OR Motor racing, football, The Olympic games? All that energy and waste just to find out who can throw a stick the furthest every four years.

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

#63

Post by en-tro-py »

_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.

Why would the onus on the value prop be on the user?

There should be no shortage of examples the creator could provide, unless of course...

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

#64

Post by Quarrelsome »

throwup238 wrote: post #17
siva7 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not yet... but me in 2020 telling you what the HN frontpage 2026 would look like you would have sent me to a mental institution, wouldn't you?

Same institution I’d send Steve today. The sanatorium from American Horror Story Asylum comes to mind. Dominique, nique, nique…

we can do better than "that man is crazy". Why not pull up a line in his OPENLY AVAILABLE CODE BASE and mock that instead?

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

#65

Post by cachius »

rspeele wrote: post #58
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 d…

Reminds me of Urbit the completely exotic computer network

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

#66

Post by CharlesW »

dbbk wrote: post #50

I tried Beads and it kept breaking in such frustratingly random ways that I just added a Linear MCP server and called it a day. That's really all you need.

I've been using Beads for 5 different projects, and Beads and/or Dolt failures have been a regular thing. It's own "doctor" feature is sort of disturbing, in that it (1) tells me that my Beads setups are always at least a little bit broken, but (2) can never fix all of the issues. Hopefully the 1.0 designation means that Steve is out of "throw shit at the wall" mode. Beads is fine as a replacement for Markdown files, but I'll never go near Gas Town because of my experience with it.

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

#67

Post by karmakaze »

dang wrote: post #47
winstonp wrote: post #44

[flagged]

Please don't post personal attacks to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. Thoughtful critique is of course fine but there's no need to be personal, and it should be something we can learn from. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Does the apparent rugpull on the $GAS meme coin[0] qualify?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge#Vibe_coding_and_cr...

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

#68

Post by actionfromafar »

cachius wrote: post #65
rspeele wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

Reminds me of Urbit the completely exotic computer network

That's fully veered into cult territory.

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

#69

Post by throwup238 »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #64
throwup238 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same institution I’d send Steve today. The sanatorium from American Horror Story Asylum comes to mind. Dominique, nique, nique…

we can do better than "that man is crazy". Why not pull up a line in his OPENLY AVAILABLE CODE BASE and mock that instead?

Beads, his glorified CLI based work tracker, was over several hundred thousand lines of code, last I checked in January.

Where do I even begin to mock that except at the source? That’s just absolute insanity.

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

#70

Post by skybrian »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #30
javawizard wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love this. How did you implement gates? Are they simply tasks Claude itself has to confirm it ran, or are they scripts that run to check that the thing in question actually happened, or do they spawn a separate AI agent to check that the thing happened, or what?

Claude or whatever agent will get a message when it tries to close a task, which tells them which gates are not resolved yet, at which point, the agent will instinctively want to read the task. I did run into an issue where I forgot to add gates to a new project, so Claude did smoosh over by making a blanket gate, I have otherwise never had an issue when I defined what the gate is, Claude usually honors it. I havent…

It sounds like a gate is a prompt that shows up at the appropriate time, which works because LLM’s pay more attention to the last thing they read.

It seems like a lot of coding agent features work that way?

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