Comment by hyperpape
1 day ago
> 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.
I agree, I’m one of the Very Serious Engineers and I liked Steve’s post when I thought it was sort of tongue in cheek but was horrified to come to the HN comments and LinkedIn comments proclaiming Gastown as the future of engineering. There absolutely is a large contingent of engineers who believe this, and it has a real world impact on my job if my bosses think you can just throw a dozen AI agents at our product roadmap and get better productivity than an engineer. This is not whimsical to me, 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.
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.
I ran into this building a similar workflow with LangGraph. The prompt engineering is definitely a pain, but the real bottleneck with the coordinator model turns out to be the compounding context costs. You end up passing the full state history back and forth, so you are paying for the same tokens repeatedly. Between that and the latency from serial round-trips, it becomes very hard to justify in production.
If your boss is that bad, the correct long-term move is to leave, not to wish technology didn’t advance.
Your boss and other ones who are asleep someday will wake up too.
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.
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"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.
It may be a joke in the same way that brogramming was a joke and somehow became an enduring tech bro stereotype
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stevey already made $300K from cryptocurrency grift on Gas Town. Read his blog post about it.
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> "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.
> "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."
If I can be a bit bold and observe that this tic is also a very old rhetorical trick you see in our industry. Call it Schrodinger's Modest Proposal if you will.
In it someone writes something provocative, but casts it as both a joke and deadly serious at various points. Depending on how the audience reacts they can then double down on it being all-in-good-jest or yes-absolutely-totally. People who enjoy the author will explain the nonsensical tension as "nuance".
You see it in rationalist writing all the time. It's a tiresome rhetorical "trick" that doesn't fool anyone any more.
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.
The whole trick is having your cake and eating it too. The LessWrong style exploits the gap between the strength of the claims ("this is a big deal that explains something fundamental about the world") and the evidence/foundation (abstract armchair reasoning, unfalsifiable)
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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...
These are some very tortured interpretations you're making.
- "what's next" does not mean "production quality" and is in no way mutually exclusive with "experimental". It means exactly what it says, which is that what comes next in the evolution of LLM-based coding is orchestration of numerous agents. It does not somehow mean that his orchestrator writes production-grade code and I don't really understand why one would think it does mean that.
- "productively" also does not mean "production quality". It means getting things done, not getting things done at production-grade quality. Someone can be a productive tinkerer or they can be a productive engineer on enterprise software. Just because they have the word "product" in them does not make them the same word.
- "working effectively" is a phrase taken out of the context of this extremely clear paragraph which is saying the opposite of production-grade: "Working effectively in Gas Town involves committing to vibe coding. Work becomes fluid, an uncountable substance that you sling around freely, like slopping shiny fish into wooden barrels at the docks. Most work gets done; some work gets lost."
If he wanted to say that Gas Town wrote production grade code, he would have said that somewhere in his 8000-word post. But he did not. In fact, he said the opposite, many many many many many many times.
You're taking individual words out of context, using them to build a strawman representing a promise he never came close to making, and then attacking that strawman.
What possible motivation could you have for doing this? I have no idea.
> If you say two different and contradictory things...
He did not. Nothing in the blog post explicitly says or even remotely implies that this is production quality software. In addition, the post explicitly, unambiguously, and repeatedly screams at you that this is highly experimental, unreliable, spaghetti code, meant for writing spaghetti code.
The blog post could not possibly have been more clear.
> ...because you did it to yourself.
No, you're doing this to his words.
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. No objective reader of this would come to the conclusion that it's ambiguous or misleading.
> 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
> 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.
Our industry is held back in so many ways by engineers clinging to black-and-white thinking.
Sometimes there isn’t a “final” answer, and sometimes there is no “right” answer. Sometimes two conflicting ideas can be “true” and “correct” simultaneously.
It would do us a world of good to get comfortable with that.
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.
yeah the messaging is somewhat insecure in that it preemptively seeks to invalidate criticism by just being an experiment while simultaneously making fairly inflammatory remarks about nay sayers like they'll eat dirt if they don't get on board.
I think it's possible to convey that you believe strongly in your idea and it could be the future (or "is the future" if you're so sure of self) while it still being experimental. I think he would get less critics if he wasn't so hyperbolic in his pitch and had fewer inflammatory personal remarks about people who he hasn't managed to bring on side.
People I know who communicate like that generally struggle to contribute constructively to nuanced discussions, and tend to seek out confrontation for the sake of it.
I think you just proved mediaman's point.
> "What's next"? Not an experiment.
I think what’s next after an experiment very often is another experiment, especially when you’re doing this kind of exploratory R&D.
Keep in mind that Steve has LLMs write his posts on that blog. Things said there may not reflect his actual thoughts on the subject(s) at hand.
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.
Do you read that as giving him a pass? I read it as more of a condemnation. If you have an LLM write "your" blog posts then of course their content doesn't represent your thoughts. Discussing the contents of the post then is pointless, and we can disregard it entirely. Separately we can talk about what the person's actual views might be, using the fact that he has a machine generate his blog posts as a clue. I'm not sure I buy that the post was meaningfully LLM-generated though.
The same approach actually applies to Trump and other liars. You can't take anything they say as truth or serious intent on its own; they're not engaging in good faith. You can remove yourself one step and attempt to analyze why they say what they do, and from there get at what to take seriously and what to disregard.
In Steve's case, my interpretation is that he's extremely bullish on AI and sees his setup or something similar as the inevitable future, but he sprinkles in silly warnings to lampshade criticism. That's how the two messages of "this isn't serious" and "this is the future or software development" co-exist. The first is largely just a cover and an admission this his particular project is a mess. Note that this interpretation assumes that the contents of the blog post in question were largely written by him, even if LLM assistance was used.
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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.
Back in the day they used to be coherent.
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