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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

#81

Post by wrs »

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…

Perhaps it was his followup post about how people are lining up to throw millions of VC dollars at his bizarre whimsical fever dream that disturbs people? I’m all for arts funding, but…

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

#82

Post by timeon »

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).

How much costs you renting vibecoding tools?

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

#83

Post by kaydub »

radlad wrote: post #44
azan_ wrote: 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).

My partner is a radiologist and I'd love to hear more about what you built. The engineer in me is also curious how much this cost in credits?

It CAN be cheap.

I built a clinical pharmacist "pocket calculator" kinda app for a specific function. It was like $.60 in claude credits I think. Built with flutter + dart. It's a simple tool suite and I've only built out one of the tools so far.

Now to be fair, that $.60 session was just the coding. I did some brainstorming in chatgpt and generated good markdown files (claude.md, gemini.md, agents.md) before I started.

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

#84

Post by throwway120385 »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #55
azan_ wrote: 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…

It sounds like a medical device, in which case marketing it may require FDA approval or notification. Whereas vibe-coding a one-off tool for yourself might still require validation but you're the one taking the risk and accepting liability for it.

I think the thing you're missing is that the tool doesn't need to be marketed because someone else could ask their LLM to make them a similar tool but fitting their use case.

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

#85

Post by pja »

chwtutha wrote: post #67
piker wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

They’re part of Steve’s art project, they just don’t realise it.

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

#86

Post by throwway120385 »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #74
jcims wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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,…

What if we packaged Gas Town up in an operating system userspace, put it on rails, and gave people an interface to it?

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

#87

Post by recursive »

fragmede wrote: post #22
7777332215 wrote: post #15

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.

All compilers have bugs. Any loss of semantics during compilation would be considered a bug. In order to do that, the source and target language need to be structured and specified. I wasn't around in the 60s either, but I think that hasn't changed.

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

#88

Post by brokensegue »

timeon wrote: post #82
azan_ wrote: 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).

How much costs you renting vibecoding tools?

such tools cost 10-20/mo usually?

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

#89

Post by blenderob »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #74
jcims wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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,…

> 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.

I'm going on a tangent here but what's with this constant deprecation of mothers to make a point? There are many people here whose mothers can develop software.

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

#90

Post by saidarembrace »

piker wrote: post #52
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…

> 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".

For better or worse, we are making history.
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