Show, don't tell.
If you need ten pages to explain your project and even after I read your description, I'm still left confused why I need it at all, then maybe... I don't need it?
Gas Town Decoded
91–100 of 245 posts
Re: Gas Town Decoded
#92The 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…
If gas town can actually do stuff well at any price it'll have a radical impact on how society is organized, because there are people out there who have practically unlimited money (billions of dollars of their own to spend, plus they can get the government to print more dollars for them if necessary; you probably already know who a few of these people are).
I've only started using coding agents recently and I think they go a long way to explain why different people get different mileage from "AI." My experience with Opencode using its default model, vs. Github Copilot using its default model, is night and day. One is amazing, the other is pretty crappy. That's a product of both the software/interface and the model itself I'd suspect.
Where I think this goes in the medium term is we will absolutely spin up our own teams of agents, probably not conforming to the silly anthropomorphized "town" model with mayors and polecats and so on, but they'll be specialized to particular purposes and respond to specific events within a software architecture or a project or even a business model. Currently the sky's the limit in my mind for all the possible applications of this, and a lot of it can be done with existing and fairly cheap models too, so the bottleneck is, surprise surprise... developer time! The industry won't disappear but it will increasingly revolve around orchestrating these teams of models, and software will continue to eat the world.
Re: Gas Town Decoded
#93Claude is ok. Gas town seems like a Claude multiplier. I’m not sure more Claude is what I’d even want! Not sure I love what it does all the time, it tends to fit whatever box you setup and will easily break out if you aren’t veeeery specific. Is it better than writing a few thousand lines of code myself that I deeply understand that can debug and explain? I don’t know yet. I think it’d be good for writing functions o…
I’d like gastown more if it could run cursor-CLI instead of claude, and thus be able to choose models. Claude is okay. But these things certainly have personalities. I’m not sure which would be best for each role. But gastown’s different actors seem like a great place to take advantage of the different quirks of each. And I certainly don’t choose Claude consistently when given a choice.
Re: Gas Town Decoded
#94Real, genuinely confused human here: Can someone please clarify whether or not gas town is/was a joke? I've searched repeatedly and can't find anything that looks like an obvious tell, and I'm not sure if this is because it's actually real and people are taking it seriously, or because the pages and pages of discourse surrounding it is AI generated and taking itself literally. If it's not a joke... I have no words. Y…
It's a real open source tool Yegge has built and been using for a while now. And no, it's not insane, he's literally written a book with Gene Kim about the fundamental lessons that go into it, and he's been on lots of podcasts where he explains more. I expect major companies will soon be NIH-ing their own version of it. Even bleeding tokens as it does, the cost is less than an engineer, and produces working software…
Where is the working software it produces? Do you have a repo you've made with it as an example?
Re: Gas Town Decoded
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
We are perpetually just months away from software jobs being obsolete.
AGI was achieved internally at OpenAI a year ago.
Multiple companies have already re-hired staff they had fired and replaced with AI.
etc.
Re: Gas Town Decoded
#96I 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-...
That entire article sounds like my friends who think AI is real and keep sending their parents money into crypto scams.
I think I’ll just develop a drinking problem if this is Gas Town becomes something real in the industry and this kind of person is now one of our thought leaders.
Re: Gas Town Decoded
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The passive voice is doing a lot of work in your sentence.
We are perpetually just months away from software jobs being obsolete. AGI was achieved internally at OpenAI a year ago. Multiple companies have already re-hired staff they had fired and replaced with AI. etc.
Your problem is thinking that hype artists, professionals and skeptics are all the same voice with the same opinion. Because of that, you can't recognize when sentiment is changing among the more skeptical.
Re: Gas Town Decoded
#98I’m very bought in to the idea that raw coding is now a solved problem with the current models and agentic harnesses. Let alone what’s coming in the near term.
That being said, I think we’re in a weird phase right now where people’s obvious mental health issues are appearing as “hyper productivity” due to the use of these tools to absolutely spam out code that isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impressive. I’m watching multiple people both publicly and privately clearly breaking down mentally because of the “power” AI is bestowing on them. Their wires are completely crossed when it comes to the value of outputs vs outcomes and they’re espousing generated nonsense as it’s thoughtful insight.
It’s an interesting thing to watch play out.
Re: Gas Town Decoded
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I should be specific. I think the technical analysis is reasonable and I actually enjoy someone staking on a big vision, which is why I saved these pieces. An example: "I’ve seen Grab’s hunger. I’ve felt it. I have it. This space is win or die. They will fight to the death, and I am with them. This company, with some 3000 employees I think, is more unified than I’ve seen with most 5-person companies. This is the kind…
This appears to be the coin in question: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/gas-town/ - up 222,513.21% in the past week! (And down 25.26% in the last 24 hours. But... suppose it goes back up again?!)
4 hours later, the 24h change is down just shy of 90%. To me this looks like a classic shitcoin pump and dump.
Re: Gas Town Decoded
#100A couple/few years ago people were trying to do agents by just putting the LLM in a loop and letting it go, and it was just awful and didn't work at all. I think a bunch of things had to happen over the course of 1-2 years to get to coding agents being a real, useful thing: models had to get quite a bit smarter/cheaper/faster, models had to get good at tool use, and they needed to be executed in well-built harnesses with good tools available.
This feels like the same thing. Too early, but we're definitely headed in the direction of finding ways to use more tokens to get more mileage per prompt.