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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

#81

Post by siliconc0w »

My experience is that Agentic Coding can legitimately get you mostly-working software. You do, however, still need to spend a few days groking, validating, and usually nudging/whacking it to conform to the shape you intended vs what the agent inferred.

It is pretty magical to go from brainstorming an idea in the evening, having ChatGPT Pro spit out a long list of beads to implement it, leaving it running over night in a totally empty repo and waking up to a mostly-implemented project.

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

#82

Post by enraged_camel »

throwup238 wrote: post #74
Quarrelsome wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> If its all obviously shit then it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe point Claude at it and ask it to find stupid stuff. What does that even mean? Am I supposed to point Claude at garbage code bases? All it will find is garbage. > My point is that just calling him names has no substance, but mocking his source specifically does. He is the source. He wrote this stuff under his own volition.

What it means is that it is easy to shit on other people's work. Much harder to give constructive criticism - especially on what looks like a throwaway account.

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

#83

Post by kami23 »

munificent wrote: post #59

> I’ve been saying since last year that by the end of 2026, people will be mostly programming by talking to a face. There’s absolutely NO reason to type with the Mayor. You should be able to chat with them like a person. You’ll have a cartoon fox there onscreen, in costume, building and managing your production software, and showing you pretty status updates whenever you ask for one. This is the end state for IDEs. T…

Eh there's also introverts like me that find typing too slow and having a conversation with a computer is my ideal interaction :)

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

#85

Post by enraged_camel »

troupo wrote: post #55
moomin wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read some of his earlier stuff. He’s a very informal writer, but he’s a damn good one with good ideas.

No. He used to be good with ideas. Now he's drinking too much of his own poison. His blog posts are bloviated monstrosities incapable of coherently describing the very trivial ideas contained in them.

I don't know, I understood it just fine? Might be a personal problem on your part.

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

#86

Post by [deleted] »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #80
throwup238 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If its all obviously shit then it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe point Claude at it and ask it to find stupid stuff. What does that even mean? Am I supposed to point Claude at garbage code bases? All it will find is garbage. > My point is that just calling him names has no substance, but mocking his source specifically does. He is the source. He wrote this stuff under his own volition.

We're supposed to be engineers. Criticising a concept based on conjecture and insult is unbecoming of our culture.

[deleted]

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

#87

Post by phpnode »

I'm pretty excited about agentic coding myself, but this does appear to be an extended ai-psychosis (i'm not super comfortable with this phrase, but it is becoming pretty recognisable).

I think he's boxed himself in by continually layering more complexity on his approach, rather than stepping back and questioning the fundamentals or the overall direction.

All of the steps Gas Town or Gas City etc are taking are towards reducing human oversight and control. This is profoundly misguided! In a world of infinite cheap software it is precisely this human decision making and control that matters.

> There will be nothing like it. You are going to want to use Gas City.

No. I do not want to talk to the mayor of my software factory, as its cartoonish minions build an infinite mountain of slop. Unreviewable, both in terms of code and the finished product.

Instead, I want to precisely capture human ideas, have those ideas questioned, challenged, improved, and then I want to bring those ideas to life, keeping the human in the loop whenever they want. Neither Beads, Gas Town, nor Gas City or anything like them are required for that.

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

#88

Post by pron »

siliconc0w wrote: post #81

My experience is that Agentic Coding can legitimately get you mostly-working software. You do, however, still need to spend a few days groking, validating, and usually nudging/whacking it to conform to the shape you intended vs what the agent inferred. It is pretty magical to go from brainstorming an idea in the evening, having ChatGPT Pro spit out a long list of beads to implement it, leaving it running over night i…

It's magical until you start going through the code carefully, line by line, and find yourself typing at the agent: YOU DID WHAT NOW? Then, when you read a few more lines and realise that neither AI nor human will be able to debug the codebase once ten more features are added you find yourself typing: REVERT. EVERYTHING.

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

#90

Post by mflanaman »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #4

I loved Beads, but kept running into issues because it is so git heavy. One: not every system and project I work on uses git. Two: Sometimes I'd switch branches, and that would screw up Beads state entirely. Three: And this is at least last I used it, there's no safety net, Claude would close a Bead, without validating anything. I wound up building my own with Claude, I made it SQLite first, syncs to GitHub, can pull…

Did you try using `git worktree`? https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree
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