Comment by Leynos
7 hours ago
Here's a counterthesis:
This is people having fun with a new technology that is far from perfect, is full of unknowns, but is ripe for exploration and discovery.
Gas Town itself is a piece of speculative fiction: throwing out a hypothesis as to what might be possible were inference to drastically drop in price. Its supervisor + isolated worker + merge factory approach is an experimental spike into how agentic coding could play out at scale.
And funnily enough, it is also the approach that Anysphere arrived at through their own experimentation.
Karpathy's alien technology metaphor is particularly apt. No one knows how to use these tools properly yet. We're having some success and a lot of fun, but really we're only going to find out by experimenting in public and sharing our results. Which means the positive and negative.
I don't understand why people see basic automation of the SDLC and think to themselves "this dude cracked the orchestration code" as if it's something profound.
I would not call this “basic automation”. I’m also not saying “this dude cracked the orchestration code” (you’re free to be mad at people who are, but I feel like it’s more interesting to engage with the people who aren’t).
I will say that Gas Town is the most maximalist approach I’ve seen to accounting for the myriad flaws of current generation agents, essentially treating them as cattle and seeing if something of worth can be gained from a sort of brute force approach. I think that’s interesting, and I’m glad that someone built a (somewhat) working system to show what happens if you do that, because no one has built something like this (in public) before.
Overall I think it’s way better to think about this as a big gift basket full of ideas. Take the ones you like, regift the almonds to your cousin if you don’t like them. If someone sees me eating Gas Town banana cream truffle and goes “ZOMG, I NEED TO BUY $GAS NOW.” then that’s their problem, as neither Steve Yegge nor I are telling them to do that.
Because they aren't saying that.
They're saying "this is a very thoughtful way to approach orchestration for using AI coding agents". This experiment is profound not because it works or because its THE end game, but rather it's a novel approach worth testing...but so is Ralph AI.
The supervisor-worker architecture is standard for distributed systems, but I'm not sure the unit economics make sense yet. Given current latency and inference costs, that specific pattern seems significantly more expensive and slower than a human developer.
They don't make sense yet. It works out very expensive at present. Far too expensive to run as anything other than an experiment.
> The supervisor-worker architecture is standard for distributed systems, but I'm not sure the unit economics make sense yet. ... [T]hat specific pattern seems significantly more expensive and slower than a human developer.
Yeggie very explicitly states that Gas Town is for people who give zero shits about how much money they're forking over to their LLM company. If I remember correctly, he said that he had to get a second entire account because of how much money he was spending.
The better comp is how much gastown would cost if it weren't on subsidized the 200$ per month claude max plans (even if he is using 2 of them)
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is it not also one of the most logical approaches to experiment with first? it's loosely how I've been working with agents as well.
I make this point to say, if someone were to try to claim this approach as IP we should expect it to be denied right?
I guess you could say that is perhaps why the suggestion made by the post being replied to doesn't make much sense to me.
I fail to see how anyone had fun with cursors Web browser.
Gastown is fun in the same way time cube is.
If it smells like bullshit and looks like bullshit there's little need to eat it to make sure it tastes like bullshit too.
You don't think Anysphere did?
There's this saying, "you must be great at parties.
Not in a dunk style reply. Just more: you fail to see it.
I looked at the code base. Did you?