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Gas Town Decoded

alilleybrinker.com

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Re: Gas Town Decoded

#81

Post by eru »

_ea1k wrote: post #52
bastawhiz wrote: post #7

The idea of gas town is simultaneously appealing and appalling to me. The waste and lack of control is wild, but at the same time there's at least a nugget of fascinating, useful work in there. In a world where compute is cheap and abundant and the models are a notch smarter, I think it's the start of a useful framework for what the future of augmented work might look like. I have no interest in using gas town as it…

I put it in a VM and had it build a really simple todo app for me the other day. It wasted so many tokens that I can't help but agree with you right now. And I could certainly have done the same thing with beads and opus in approximately the same amount of time. However, the gas town one was almost completely hands off. I think my only interventions were due to how beta it was, so I had to help it work around its own…

I guess tokens get cheaper all the time, and we can fix the risk via sufficient sand boxing. (I mean the risk to your computer.)

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#82

Post by eru »

ares623 wrote: post #75
soulofmischief wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wright brothers are idiots, if it were me I'd have made a supersonic jet from the get go and not waste my time mucking around with prototypes.

We were promised supersonic jets today or very soon though and our economies have been held hostage waiting for that promise.

The passive voice is doing a lot of work in your sentence.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#83

Post by mythrwy »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #60
wild_egg wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beads was phenomenal back in October when it was released. Unfortunately it has somehow grown like a cancer. Now 275k lines of Go for task tracking? And no human fully knows what it is all doing. Steve Yegge is quite proud to say he's never looked at any of its code. It installs magic hooks and daemons all over your system and refuses to let go. Most user hostile software I've used in a long time. Lot of folks rollin…

If your task tracking app is 275k lines you fucked up.

The LLM providers got paid.

Reminds me of an offshore project I was involved with at one point. It had something like 7 managers and 4 years and over 30 developers had worked on it. The billing had reached into the millions. It was full of never ending bugs. The amount of "extra" code and abstractions and interfaces was stuff of legends.

It was actually a month or three simple crud project for a 2 man development team.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#84

Post by CuriouslyC »

arcanemachiner wrote: post #64
CuriouslyC wrote: post #62

I don't understand why people are making this so complicated. We have a battle tested SDLC. We don't need to reinvent this shit. We just need to make some affordances in the tools and processes we set up for the majority of the actors in the system to be agents (such as rationing human attention). Spec your software like an architect/po, decompose it into a task dag, then orchestrate for each lane and assemble all ch…

SDLC = Software Development Life Cycle (?)

Correct

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#85

Post by Avicebron »

eru wrote: post #81
_ea1k wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I put it in a VM and had it build a really simple todo app for me the other day. It wasted so many tokens that I can't help but agree with you right now. And I could certainly have done the same thing with beads and opus in approximately the same amount of time. However, the gas town one was almost completely hands off. I think my only interventions were due to how beta it was, so I had to help it work around its own…

I guess tokens get cheaper all the time, and we can fix the risk via sufficient sand boxing. (I mean the risk to your computer.)

I've been running my own version of what Gas Town seems to be in a couple of proxmox hosts for a while now, it's fine.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#86

Post by toephu2 »

keyle wrote: post #66

I'd help build Gas City and Gas State, and Gas Country if that would mean we actually would solve the things AI promised to solve. All sickness, famine, wealth ... The problem is, we're just fidgeting yolo-fizzbuzz ad nauseam. The return on investment at the moment is probably one of the worst in the history of human investments. AI does improve over time, still today, but we're going to run out of planet before we g…

AI can't even find a cure for the common cold.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#87

Post by condiment »

bastawhiz wrote: post #7

The idea of gas town is simultaneously appealing and appalling to me. The waste and lack of control is wild, but at the same time there's at least a nugget of fascinating, useful work in there. In a world where compute is cheap and abundant and the models are a notch smarter, I think it's the start of a useful framework for what the future of augmented work might look like. I have no interest in using gas town as it…

If software engineers can agree on anything, it's that LLM experiences are wildly inconsistent. People have similar inconsistencies. We have different experiences, intellects, educations, priorities, motivations, value systems. And in software specifically (and institutions generally) we create methodologies and processes that diminish our inconsistencies and leverage our strengths.

Gas town is a demonstration of a methodology for getting a consistent result from inconsistent agents. The case in point is that Yegge claims to have solved the MAKER problem (tower of Hanoi) via prompting alone. With the right structure, quantity has a quality all its own.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#88

Post by Philpax »

jrowen wrote: post #77
Animats wrote: post #72

This looks familiar to people who have seen how the more elaborate NPC systems work in major multiplayer games. There are lots of semi-independent NPCs, with some degree of overall coordination. Groups of cops or soldiers may have a commander program for tactical coordination, and there may be a higher level system deploying units for strategic purposes. In games, what the NPCs can do is usually rather dumb. Move and…

What games are notable in this regard? The classic Majesty series comes to mind. UO aspired to complex NPC systems. Fable as well. I always dreamt of a more advanced Sim City-meets-MMO that just went all in on that.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/why-fears-ai-is-still-the-b...

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#89

Post by alexjurkiewicz »

fdr wrote: post #33

I use beads quite a bit, but not as steve intended. And definitely the opposite of "Gas Town," where I use the note-taking capability and integration with Git (that is, as something of a glorified Makefile and database) to debug contexts, to close the loop and increase accuracy over time. Nevertheless, it has been useful for large batch runs over my code base: the record has been processing for thirty hours straight…

His latest post is endorsing a crypto exchange because they paid him $50k.

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-...

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