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

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

#91

Post by anonymous908213 »

blenderob wrote: post #89
anonymous908213 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People's mothers are statistically unlikely to be programmers, obviously. My own grandmother was a programmer, but it conveys the idea in two words rather than making up a clunky phrase to describe the exact degree of non-techiness of the hypothetical person.

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

#92

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

causalmodels wrote: post #31
anonymous908213 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yegge obviously built real software in the past. He has not built real software wherein he never looked at the code, as he is now promoting.

Ok but this entire idea is very new. Its not an honest criticism to say no one has tried the new idea when they are actively doing it. Honestly I don't get the hostility. Yegge is running an experiment. I don't think it will work, but it will be interesting and informative to watch.

> Ok but this entire idea is very new. Its not an honest criticism to say no one has tried the new idea when they are actively doing it.

Not really new. Back in the day companies used to outsource their stuff to the lowest bidder agencies in proverbial Elbonia, never looked at the code, and then panickedly hired another agency when the things visibly were not what was ordered. Case studies are abound on TheDailyWTF for the last two decades.

Doing the same with agents will give you the same disastrous results for comparably the same money, just faster. Oh and you can't sue them, really.

Maybe it's better, who knows.

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

#93

Post by Ronsenshi »

crote wrote: post #57
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #11

> I also think Yegge deserves praise for exercising agency and taking a swing at a system like this, despite the inefficiencies and chaos of this iteration. And then running a public tour of his shitty, quarter-built plane while it’s mid-flight. Can we please stop with the backhanded compliments and judgement? This is cutting edge technology in a brand new field of computing using experimental methods. Please give th…

> Please give the guy a break. At least he's trying to advance the state of the art. The problem is that as an outsider it really looks like someone is trying to herd a bunch of monkeys into writing Shakespeare, or trying to advance impressionist art by pretending a baby's first crayon scratches are equivalent to a Pollock. I bet he's having a lot of fun playing around with "cutting-edge technology", but it's missing…

I agree that he probably has a lot of fun. What he's doing is an equivalent of throwing a hand grenade into a crowd and enjoying the chaos of it all - he's set in life, can comfortably retire while the rest of the industry tries to deal with that hand grenade. Where some people are fighting to get the safety pin out while others are trying to stop them.

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

#94

Post by furyofantares »

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…

Who's promising it works?

It's an experiment to discover what the limits are. Maybe the experiment fails because it's scoped beyond the limits of LLMs. Maybe we learn something by how far it gets exactly. Maybe it changes as LLMs get better, or maybe it's a flawed approach to pushing the limits of these.

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

#95

Post by anonymous908213 »

throwway120385 wrote: post #86
anonymous908213 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

An interface isn't enough. Even if you never look at the code, the results are going to be influenced significantly by having the vocabulary to accurately describe what you want. The less sufficient your technical vocabulary, the more ambiguous your prompts will be and the less likely it is that the Polecats will be able to deliver anything resembling your unspoken imagination. To say nothing of being able to guide the lost critters when they run into problems.

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

#96

Post by kibwen »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #64

If it's stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid. Gas town transcends stupid. It is an abstract garbage generator. Call it art, call it an experiment, but you cannot call it a solution to a problem by any definition of the word.

"If it's stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid" is a maxim that only applies to luxury use cases where the results fundamentally don't matter.

As soon as the results actually matter, the maxim becomes "if it works, but it's stupid, it doesn't work".

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

#97

Post by hyperpape »

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, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment:

So, Steve has the big scary "YOU WILL DIE" statements in there, but he also has this:

> I went ahead and built what’s next. First I predicted it, back in March, in Revenge of the Junior Developer. I predicted someone would lash the Claude Code camels together into chariots, and that is exactly what I’ve done with Gas Town. I’ve tamed them to where you can use 20–30 at once, productively, on a sustained basis.

"What's next"? Not an experiment. A prediction about how we'll work. The word "productively"? "Productively" is not just "a big fun experiment." "Productively" is what you say when you've got something people should use.

Even when he's giving the warnings, he says things like "If you have any doubt whatsoever, then you can’t use it" implying that it's ready for the right sort of person to use, or "Working effectively in Gas Town involves committing to vibe coding.", implying that working effectively with it is possible.

Every day, I go on Hacker News, and see the responses to a post where someone has an inconsistent message in their blog post like this.

If you say two different and contradictory things, and do not very explicitly resolve them, and say which one is the final answer, you will get blamed for both things you said, and you will not be entitled to complain about it, because you did it to yourself.

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

#99

Post by AtlasBarfed »

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 where he probably Burns like a million dollars of money.

Just for fun!

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

#100

Post by kami23 »

radlad wrote: post #48
pdntspa wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worry about people who use this approach where they never look at the code. Vibe-coding IS possible but you have to spent a lot of time in plan mode and be very clear about architecture and the abstractions you want it to use. I've written two seperate moderately-sized codebases using agentic techniques (oftentimes being very lazy and just blanket approving changes), and I don't encounter logic or off-by-one errors…

In a recent Yegge interview, he mentions that he often throws away the entire codebase and starts from scratch rather than try to get LLMs to refactor their code for architecture.

This has been my best way to learn, put one agent on a big task, let it learn things about the problem and any gotchas, and then have it take notes, do it again until I'm happy with the result, if in the middle I think there's two choices that have merit I ask for a subagent to go explore that solution in another worktree and to make all its own decisions, then I compare. I also personally learn a lot about the problem space during the process so my prompts and choices on us sequent iterations use the right language I need to use.
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