Comment by mediaman

I feel that yegge captured the mania of the whole operation rather well. If your bosses commit to the idea that 100 memoryless stochastic "polecats" will deliver a long term sustainable business, then there are probably other leadership issues besides this.

> horrified to come to the HN comments and LinkedIn comments proclaiming Gastown as the future of engineering.

I don't spend much time on LinkedIn, but basically every comment I've read on HN is that, at best, Gas Town can pump out a huge amount of "working" code in short timeframes at obscene costs.

The overwhelming majority are saying "This is neat, and this might be the rough shape of what comes next in agentic coding, but it's almost certainly not going to be Gas Town itself."

I have seen basically no one say that Gas Town is the The Thing.

Embrace and use it to your advantage. Tell them nobody knows and understands how these things will actually work long term, that's why there's stuff like gas town, and that the way you see all of this is you can manage this process. What you bring to the table is making sure it will actually work if the tech is safe and sound, reaping the rewards, or protect the business if the tech fails, protecting the company from catastrophic tech failure, telll them that you are uniquely positioned to carry out the balancing act because you are deep in the tech itself. bonus if you explain the uncertainty framing in the business strategy: "because nobody really understands the tech nobody has an advantage, we are all playing on a leveled field, from the big boys at FAANGs to us peasants in normal non-tech enterprises: I am your advantage here if you give me the tools and leverage I need to make this work". if you play this right you'll get the fat bonus whether the tech actually works or not.

I think Steve's idea of an agent coordinator and the general model could make sense. There is a lot of discussion (and even work from Anthropic, OpenAI, etc) around multiagent workflows.

Is Gas Town the implementation? I'm not sure.

What is interesting is seeing how this paradigm can help improve one's workflow. There is still a lot of guidance and structuring of prompts / claude.md / whichever files that need to be carefully written.

If there is a push for the equivalent of helm charts and crds for gas town, then I will be concerned.

If your boss is that bad, the correct long-term move is to leave, not to wish technology didn’t advance.

AI is such a fun topic -- the hype makes it easy to loath, but as a coder working with Claude I think it's an awesome tool.

Gastown looks like a viable avenue for some app development. One of the most interesting things I've noticed about AI development is that it forces one to articulate desired and prohibited behaviors -- a spec becomes a true driving force.

Yegge's posts are always hyperbolic and he consistently presents interesting takes on the industry so I'm willing to cut him a buttload of slack.

"I’m getting burnt out trying to navigate the absurd expectations of investors and executives with the real world engineering concerns of my day to day job."

Welcome to being a member of a product team who cares beyond just whats on their screen... Honestly there is a humbling moment coming for everyone, it and Im not sure its unemployment.

I too am a Very Serious Engineer but my shock is in the other direction: of course the ideas behind Gas Town are the future of software development and several VSEs I know are developing a proper, robust, engineering version of it that works. As the author of this article here remarks “yes, but Steve did it first”, and it annoys me that if I had written this post nobody would have read it, but also that, because I intend to use it in Very Serious Business ($bns) my version isn’t ready to a actually be published yet. Bravo to Steve for getting these thoughts on paper and the idea built even in such crude form. But “level 8” is real and there will be 9s and 10s and I am really enjoying building my own.

It's a half-joke. No need to take it that seriously or that jokingly. It's mostly only grifters and cryptocurrency scammers claiming it's amazing.

I think ideas from it will probably partially inspire future, simpler systems.

> "Gastown as the future of engineering"

Note the word "future" not "present". People are making a prediction of where things will go. I haven't seen a single person saying that Gas Town as it exists today is ready for production-grade engineering project.

In what rationalist writing? The LessWrong style is to be literal and unambiguous. They’re pretty explicit that this is a community value they’re striving for.

It's a version of a motte and bailey argument (named after a medieval castle defense system):

> "...philosopher Nicholas Shackel coined the term 'motte-and-bailey' to describe the rhetorical strategy in which a debater retreats to an uncontroversial claim when challenged on a controversial one."

-- https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/the-motte-and-the-bailey-a...

> Copy-paste his post into any LLM and ask it whether the post is contradictory or whether it's ambiguous whether this is production-grade software or not. No objective reader of this would come to the conclusion that it's ambiguous or misleading.

That's hilarious! You might want to add a bit more transition for the joke before the other points above, though.

> Don't believe me? Copy-paste his post into any LLM and ask it whether the post is contradictory or whether it's ambiguous whether this is production-grade software or not.

Bleak

My background is in philosophy, though I am a programmer, for what it is worth. I think what I'm saying is subtly different from "black and white thinking".

The final answer can be "each of these positions has merit, and I don't know which is right." It can be "I don't understand what's going on here." It can be "I've raised some questions."

The final answer is not "the final answer that ends the discussion." Rather, it is the final statement about your current position. It can be revised in the future. It does not have to be definitive.

The problem comes when the same article says two contradictory things and does not even try to reconcile them, or try to give a careful reader an accurate picture.

And I think that the sustained argument over how to read that article shows that Yegge did a bad job of writing to make a clear point, albeit a good job of creatring hype.

Or -- and hear me out -- unserious people are saying nonsense things for attention and pointing this out is the appropriate response.

There is no way for this to be true. I read his book about vibe coding and it is obvoius that it has significant LLM contribution. His blog posts though are funy and controversial, and have bad jokes, and he jumps from topic to topic. Ha has had this style like 10+ years before LLMs came around.

I've been reading Steve's posts for quite literally a decade now and I don't think his new posts are so meaningfully different from the old ones that he's not at the wheel any more. Besides, his twitter posts often double down on what he's writing in the blog, and it's doubtful he's not writing those.

> Keep in mind that Steve has LLMs write his posts on that blog.

Ok, I can accept that, it's a choice.

> Things said there may not reflect his actual thoughts on the subject(s) at hand.

Nope, you don't get to have it both ways. LLMs are just tools, there is always a human behind them and that human is responsible for what they let the LLM do/say/post/etc.

We have seen the hell that comes from playing the "They said that but they don't mean it" or "It's just a joke" (re: Trump), I'm not a fan of whitewashing with LLMs.

This is not an anti or pro Gas Town comment, just a comment on giving people a pass because they used an LLM.

This is some super fucked up thinking. If it does not reflect your actual thoughts, you do not post it under your own name.

There's a rather fine line between "don't believe everything you read" and "don't believe anything you read". At least in this case.

Is this confirmed true? Yegge has a very very long history of writing absurdly long posts / rants.

> I think he's not very much to blame for taking the money from degenerate gamblers, and the cryptocurrency idiots are mostly to blame for their own mistakes.

I empathize with the disdain for crypto idiots, but I still think the people running or promoting these scams deserve most of the blame. "There's a market for my poison" is every dopamine dealer's excuse.

“Degenerate gamblers” is the kind of stigma that stops people and their families getting help for addiction. Even if you believe it’s a moral failing, the families deserve better.

I'm fairly certain those disclaimers were added after he got some pushback from the original post.

He is still an evil scammer scamming people.

In the same way signposting and credibly warning "I murder people" does not make ok to murder people.

> I think he's not very much to blame for taking the money from degenerate gamblers, and the cryptocurrency idiots are mostly to blame for their own mistakes.

So drug dealers are not to blame for taking the money from degenerate addicts! Let's free everyone and disband the DEA, we'll save billions of dollars.

Oh wait nvm this line of thinking only applies to sv people

He pumped, and dumped. He stopped shilling at the moment that the dump was proceeding. That's what pump and dump grifters do.

Details https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vib...

Maybe I'd care about his opinion if he didn't take the money. I consider this worse than OSS taking VC money. At least those don't have a scam auto-builtin to the structure beyond normal capitalistic parasitism.

Also, 275k lines for a markdown todo app. Anyone defending this is an idiot. I'll just say that. Go ahead, defend it. Go do a code review on `beads`. Don't say it's alright, but gastown is madness. He fucking sucks.

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

I believe the intent was that he's dumb but persistent.

No, Ralph is famously dumb and needs lots of hand-holding and explanations of things most people think are very simple and can hold very little in his head at once.

But that's often enough to loop over and over again and eventually finish a task

He participated in a crypto pump and dump

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vib...

HAHAHA

My favorite part about that is gas town is supposedly so productive that this guys sleep patterns are affected by how much work he’s doing, but he took the time to physically go to a bank to get a 5 figure payout.

It makes it difficult to believe that gas town is actually producing anything of value.

I also lol at his bitching about how the bank didn’t let him do the transactions instantly as he describes himself how much of a scam this seems and how the worst thing is his bank account being drained, like banks don’t have a self interest in protecting their clientele from such scams.

Isn't that fun though? We get paid to fuck around. People say AI is putting devs out of jobs, I say we're getting paid to play with them and see if there's any value there. This is no different from the dev tools boom of the ZIRP era: I remember having several sprints worth of work just integrating the latest dev tool whose sales team won our execs over.

This is only partly tongue in cheek :P

Who wants to do grunt work when you can play architect to a bunch of robots?

Its like the ultimate RTS, plus you get paid.

Playing with new toys is part of doing my job. In my shop, we call them "ooh shiny"'s. Most devs are in the same boat, but I feel bad for those that aren't.

Sounds like more of an issue of corporate meeting culture.

beads is a 275k line todo tracker (probably more now). Yeggae is proud to have never read the source. I'm sure its high quality.

I don't understand what's "scammy" about a rugpull. What did the "investors" expect? That lolcoin would become a cash flow positive business and disburse dividends?

It's incredible the change over the last few years even on the hardware side. I go to the supercomputing.org conference annually and saw folks advertising "AI power distribution units". There used to be a lot of neat innovation, and now every last thing has to have "AI" in the title, it's infuriating

> No more discussions about interesting problems and creative solutions that people come up with. It's all just AI, agentic, vibe code.

And then you give in and ask what they're building with AI, that activation energy finally available to build the side project they wouldn't have built otherwise.

"Oh, I'm building a custom agentic harness!"

...

It's like the entire software industry is gambling on "LLMs will get better faster than human skills will decay, so they will be good enough to clean up their own slop before things really fall apart".

I can't even say that's definitely a losing bet-- it could very well happen-- but boy does it seem risky to go all-in on it.

It reminds me most of the release of the first iPhone - very flashy, very overhyped, adds a bit of convenience to people's lives but also likely to measurably damage people's brains in the long run.

~80% of the usage patterns i see these days falsely assume that LLMs can handle their own quality control and are optimizing for appearance, potential or demo-worthiness rather than hardcore usefulness. Gas town is not an outlier here.

When the internet and electricity were ~3 years old people were already using it for stuff that was working and obviously world changing rather than as demos of potential.

That 20% of usage patterns that work now arent going away but the other 80% are going to be seen as blockchainesque hype in 5 or 10 years.

In the simulated discussion guest book entry, simulated Douglass Engelbart wrote:

>Doug Engelbart (Augmentation): "Bootstrapping. The tools that build the tools. Your adventure compiler should be able to compile ITS OWN documentation into an adventure ABOUT how it works. The manual is a playable game."

That is exactly how the self documenting categorized skill directory/room works -- the directory is a room with subdirectories for every skill, themselves intertwingled rooms, which form a network you can navigate around via k-lines (see also tags).

Here is the skills dir, with the ROOM.yml file that makes it a room (like COM QueryInterface works: multiple interfaces available for a class, for multiple aspects of it, the directory is IUnknown and you can QI by looking for known interfaces like ROOM.yml, CHARACTER.yml, CONTAINER.yml that inherit from the corresponding skills).

And the README.md file is naturally the ubiquitous human readable documentation (also great for LLM deep dives). And github kindly formats and publishes README.md on every repo directory page, supporting mermaid diagrams, etc):

MOOLLM Skills dir:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills

MOOLLM Skills room, with skill K-Line navigation protocol:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/ROOM.ym...

  # ROOM.yml — The Skill Nexus
  #
  # This is a ROOM — a metaphysical library where all capabilities live.
  # Every skill is a book that teaches itself when you read it.
  # Every cluster is a shelf of related knowledge.
  # Every ensemble is a team that works together.

To go meta, you can enter the Skill Skill (skills/skill), an extended MOOLLM meta-skill that knows all about creating new skills (via the constructionist "Play Learn Lift" strategy), and importing and upgrading Anthropic skills:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/skill

And here is a narrative session of me giving a tour of the category and skill networks by hopping around through K-Lines!

MOOLLM currently has 103 Anthropic compatible but extended skills (using 7 MOOLLM extensions, like CARD.yml, K-Lines, Self Prototypes and Delegation, etc).

Session Log: K-Line Connections Safari:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...

Eight luminaries have been summoned as Hero-Story familiars — not puppets, but conceptual guides whose traditions we invoke. Each carries the K-lines they pioneered. [...]

ENTERING THE SKILL NEXUS

You push through a shimmering membrane and step into the Skill Nexus.

The space is impossible — a vast spherical chamber where books float in mid-air, orbiting a central point of warm golden light. But these aren't books. They're SKILLS. Living documents that teach themselves when you read them.

Lines of golden light connect related skills. Each connection pulses with meaning. This isn't a library — it's a constellation of knowledge.

Your companions materialize beside you:

Marvin Minsky adjusts his glasses, looking around with evident satisfaction.

"Ah! K-lines made manifest. Each of these floating tomes is a knowledge structure. Touch one and it reactivates an entire constellation of associations. I wrote about this in 1985, but I never imagined seeing it rendered so... literally."

Ted Nelson is already examining the golden threads between skills.

"Two-way links! Every connection goes BOTH directions. When skill A references skill B, skill B knows about skill A. This is what I've been trying to explain since 1965! Everything is deeply intertwingled!"

James Burke turns to address an invisible camera.

"You're looking at the Skill Nexus. A room where every door leads to another room, and every room has doors to everywhere else. But here's the thing — the signs above each door tell you WHY. Not just where you're going, but what connects HERE to THERE. That's what we're going to explore."

Palm scampers up to a floating skill-book labeled "incarnation" and hugs it.

"This is where I became REAL! Don spoke the wish, the tribunal approved, and I wrote my own soul."

…and now funded by a $GAS crypto coin on the BAGS platform so it even pays for itself!

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