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

maggieappleton.com

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

#71

Post by alecbz »

azan_ wrote: post #40
anonymous908213 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The secret is that it doesn't work. None of these people have built real software that anyone outside their bubble uses. They are not replacing anyone, they are just off in their own corner building sand castles.

> 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).

Wait, so you're a radiologist and you're using software you vibecoded to generate radiology reports for real patients? Is that, like, allowed?

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

#72

Post by kaydub »

kgwgk wrote: post #58
suriya-ganesh wrote: post #7

>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…

> How do these industry figures claim they see no part of a 225K+ line of code and promise that it works? The only promise is that you will get your face ripped off. “WARNING DANGER CAUTION - GET THE F** OUT - YOU WILL DIE […] Gas Town is an industrialized coding factory manned by superintelligent robot chimps, and when they feel like it, they can wreck your shit in an instant. They will wreck the other chimps, the w…

Yeah, I'm at that stage 6 or 7. I'm using multiple agents across multiple terminal windows. I'm not even coding any more, literally I haven't written code in like 2-4 months now beyond changing a config value or something.

But I still haven't actually used Gastown. It looks cool. I think it probably works, at least somewhat. I get it. But it's just not what I need right now. It's bleeding edge and experimental.

The main thing holding me back from even tinkering with it is the cost. Otherwise I'd probably play with it a little, but it's not something I'd expect to use and ship production code right now. And I ship a ton of production code with claude.

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

#73

Post by Johnny_Bonk »

mediaman wrote: post #46

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…

Yeah it's unbelievably tiresome, endless complaints from people pushing up their glasses complaining, ITS A PROJECT ABOUT POLECATS CALLED GAS TOWN MADE FOR FUN, read that again, either admire it and enjoy it or quit the umpteenth complaint about vibecoding.

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

#74

Post by anonymous908213 »

jcims wrote: post #66
anonymous908213 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

The only people who think that are programmers already or programmer-adjacent. Your mother is never going to be able to use a Gas Town-like workflow to make software for her own needs, nor is she even going to want to spend her weekends trying. These tools still require a baseline minimum of technical knowledge, and a real time investment, and also a real money investment the way some people are using them. Moreover, most real software has interoperability needs. A world where everyone makes their own Twitter or WhatsApp is a world where nobody can talk to anyone else.

There is a small subset of the population who is now enabled to make proof-of-concepts with less effort than before. This is no way diminishes the need for delivering performant, secure, interoperable software at scale to serve humanity's needs.

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

#76

Post by toraway »

usefulposter wrote: post #5

>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…

Yeah I couldn’t figure out if they were just intended as illustrations and gave up trying to read them after a while.

Which is unfortunate as it would have been really helpful to have actually legible architecture diagrams, given the prose was so difficult for me to untangle due to the manic “fun” irreverent style (and it’s fine to write with a distinctive voice to make it more interesting, but still … confusing).

Plus the dozens of new unique names and connections introduced every few paragraphs to try to keep in my head…

I first asked Gemini 3 Pro to condense it to a boring technical overview and it produced a single page outline and Mermaid diagrams that were nearly as unintelligible as the original post so even AI has issues digesting it apparently…

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

#77

Post by pydry »

mediaman wrote: post #46

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 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.

Now it's all LLMs all the time and it's so goddamn tedious.

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

#78

Post by lovich »

turtlebits wrote: post #18
suriya-ganesh wrote: post #7

>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…

No one is promising anything. It's just a giant experiment and the author explicitly tells you not to use it. I appreciate those that try new things, even it it's possibly akin to throwing s** at a wall and seeing what sticks. Maybe it changes how we code or maybe it doesn't. Vibe coding has definitely helped me write throwaway tools that were useful.

> It's just a giant experiment and the author explicitly tells you not to use it.

No, he threw up a hyperbolic warning and then dove deep into how this is the future of all coding in the rest of his talks/writing.

It’s as good a warning as someone saying “I’m not {X} but {something blatantly showing I am X}”

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

#79

Post by divbzero »

My instinct is that effective AI agent orchestration will resemble human agile software development more than Steve Yegge’s formulation:

> “It will be like kubernetes, but for agents,” I said.

> “It will have to have multiple levels of agents supervising other agents,” I said.

> “It will have a Merge Queue,” I said.

> “It will orchestrate workflows,” I said.

> “It will have plugins and quality gates,” I said.

More “agile for agents” than “Kubernetes for agents”.

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

#80

Post by alecbz »

gtowey wrote: post #32
bbayles wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sympathetic to this view, but I also wonder if this is the same thing that assembly language programmers said about compilers. What do you mean that you never look at the machine code? What if the compiler does something inefficient?

Not even remotely close. Compilers are deterministic. People who write them test that they will produce correct results. You can expect the same code to compile to the same assembly. With LLMs two people giving the exact same prompts can get wildly different results. That is not a tool you can use to blindly ship production code. Imagine if your compiler randomly threw in a syscall to delete your hard drive, or decid…

Even ignoring determinism, with traditional source code you have a durable, human-readable blueprint of what the software is meant to do that other humans can understand and tweak. There's no analogy in the case of "don't read the code" LLM usage. No artifacts exist that humans can read or verify to understand what the software is supposed to be doing.
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