I'm developing concern for Steve. He's been a well known developer and writer in the industry for years now (See his popular 'Google Platforms Rant' essay from years ago) [0].<p>Now, Yegge's writing tilts towards the grandoise... see his writing when joining Grab [1] and Sourcegraph [2] respectively versus how things actually played out.<p>I prefer optimism and I'm not anti AI by any means, but given his observed behavior and how AI can't exacerbate certain pathologies... not great. Adding the recent crypto activities on top and all that entails is the ingredients for a powder keg.<p>Hope someone is looking out for him.<p>[0] <a href="https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse452/23wi/papers/yegge-platform-rant.html" rel="nofollow">https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse452/23wi/papers...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://steve-yegge.medium.com/why-i-left-google-to-join-grab-86dfffc0be84" rel="nofollow">https://steve-yegge.medium.com/why-i-left-google-to-join-gra...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://sourcegraph.com/blog/introducing-steve-yegge" rel="nofollow">https://sourcegraph.com/blog/introducing-steve-yegge</a>
The Gas Town post reads like some type of manic psychosis. I hope he snaps out of it and gets help.
He was right about Google in [1] when I was still drinking the Kool-Aid, in big and tangible ways that aren't discussed publicly.<p>[2] is 100% accurate, Grok was the backbone / glue of Google's internal developer tools.<p>I don't disagree on the current situation, and I'm uncomfortable sticking my neck out on this because I'm basically saying "the guy who kinda seems out of totally wasn't out of when you think he was", but [1] and [2] definitely aren't grandiose, the claims he makes re: Google and his work there are accurate. A small piece of why I feel comfortable in this, is that both of these were public blogs his employer was 100% happy about when hiring him to top positions.
Real, 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.<p>If it's not a joke... I have no words. You've all gone insane.
It's not a joke, but I think it's an example of the same thing we're seeing with folks who think they're talking to god when they talk to ChatGPT, or those who spiral and in some cases, sadly take their own life.<p>These chatbots create an echo chamber unlike that which we've ever had to deal with before. If we thought social media was bad, this is way worse.<p>I think Gastown and Beads are examples of this applied to software engineering. Good software is built with input from others. I've seen many junior engineers go off and spend weeks building the wrong thing, and it's a mess, but we learn to get input, we learn to have our ideas critiqued.<p>LLMs give us the illusion of pair programming, of working with a team, but they're not. LLMs vastly accelerate the rate at which you can spiral spiral down the wrong path, or down a path that doesn't even make sense. Gastown and Beads are that. They're fever dreams. They work, somewhat, but even just a little bit of oversight, critique, input from others, would have made them far better.
It's a double edged sword. If it can lead the uninformed down the wrong path faster, it can lead the informed down the right path faster. It's not only fast in one direction.
I believe the author of gas town is very informed, having been a professional software developer for some time. And the premise of the above comment is that he did, despite this, go down the wrong path.
Not sure you’ve actually tried using it, but beads has been an absolute game changer for my projects. “Game changer” is even underselling it.
Beads was phenomenal back in October when it was released. Unfortunately it has somehow grown like a cancer. Now 275k lines of Go for task tracking? And no human fully knows what it is all doing. Steve Yegge is quite proud to say he's never looked at any of its code. It installs magic hooks and daemons all over your system and refuses to let go. Most user hostile software I've used in a long time.<p>Lot of folks rolling their own tools as replacements now. I shared mine [0] a couple weeks ago and quite a few folks have been happy with the change.<p>Regardless of what you do, I highly recommend to everyone that they get off the Beads bandwagon before it crashes them into a brick wall.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/wedow/ticket" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wedow/ticket</a>
How do you handle the dogs ignoring the deacons and going after the polecats though? Seems like the mayor should get involved to me.
I'm not entitled to your time of course, but would you mind describing how?<p>All I know is beads is supposed to help me retain memory from one session to the next. But I'm finding myself having to curate it like a git repo (and I already have a git repo). Also it's quite tied to github, which I cannot use at work. I want to use it but I feel I need to see how others use it to understand how to tailor it for my workflow.
Gas town is the cackling mad laughter emitting from someone who knows they are being both insane and prescient simultaneously. Today, it is insane. But I fully expect to be hearing about a very serious thing in the near future about which people will say “gas town was an early attempt at this”
This is the best take I've seen in here.<p>I've been tinkering with it for the past two days. It's a very real system for coordinating work between a plurality of humans and agents. Someone likened it to kubernetes in that it's a complex system that is going to necessitate a lot of invention and opinions, the fact that it *looks* like a meme is immaterial, and might be an effort to avoid people taking it too seriously.<p>Who knows where it ends up, but we will see more of this and whatever it is will have lessons learned from Gas Town in it.
This is our generations expensive typewriter: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expensive_Typewriter" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expensive_Typewriter</a><p>Utterly insane at the time it was written. The foundation of all office work 60 years later.
It doesn't have to exclusively be one or the other.<p>> If it's not a joke... I have no words. You've all gone insane.<p>I think this is covered by the part in Yegge's post where he says not to run it unless you're so rich you don't care if it works or not.
> If it's not a joke... I have no words. You've all gone insane.<p>How is it insane to jump to the logical conclusion of all of this? The article was full of warnings, its not a sensible thing to do but its a cool thing to do. We might ask whether or not it works, but does that actually matter? It read as an experiment using experimental software doing experimental things.<p>Consider a deterministic life form looking at how we program software today, that might look insane to it and gastown might look considerably more sane.<p>Everything that ever happens in human creation begins as a thought, then as a prototype before it becomes adopted and maybe (if it works/scales) something we eventually take for granted. I mean I hate it but maybe I've misunderstood my profession when I thought this job was being able to prove the correctness of the system that we release. Maybe the business side of the org was never actually interested in that in the first place. Dev and business have been misaligned with competing interests for decades. Maybe this is actually the fit. Give greater control of software engineering to people higher up the org chart.<p>Maybe this is how we actually sink c-suite and let their ideas crash against the rocks forcing c-suite to eventually become extremely technical to be able to harness this. Instead of today's reality where c-suite gorge on the majority of the profit with an extremely loosely coupled feedback loop where its incredibly difficult to square cause and effect. Stock went up on Tuesday afternoon did it? I deserve eleventy million dollars for that. I just find it odd to crap on gastown when I think our status quo is kinda insane too.
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.<p>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 much faster. The more it can be made to scale, the more incentive there is. A competitive business can't justify <i>not</i> using a system like this.
No, not a joke. The author also co-vibe-coded a book, called <i>Vibe Coding</i>, describing and recommending exactly the sort of system he's trying to build as Gas Town.
The 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.<p>I have no interest in using gas town as it is (for a plethora of reasons, not the least of which being that I'm uninterested in spending the money), but I've been fascinated with the idea of slowing it down and having it run with a low concurrency. If you've got a couple A100s, what does it look like if you keep them busy with two agents working concurrently (with 20+ agents total)? What does it mean to have the town focus the scope of work to a series of non-overlapping changesets instead of a continuous stream of work?<p>If you don't plan to have it YOLO stuff in realtime and you can handle the models being dumber than Claude, I think you can have it do some really practical, useful things that are markedly better than the tools we have today.
It seems like one of the key events that needs to happen for any professional domain to take off is for it to develop an "inside" language that nobody else understands. For example, I still don't know what a kanban or a scrum is. So I'm very ill positioned to challenge their use or question how they are done. Hence they got to dodge a whole lot of opposition that would probably have brought it all down. The invention of a new mysterious terminology I think was critical for agile to take off.<p>The problem with this phenomenon is that the same freedom from critique that is seemingly necessary for new domains to establish themselves also detaches them from necessary criticism. There's simply no way to tell if this isn't a load of baloney. And by the time it's a bullet point requirement on CVs to get employed it's too late for anybody to critique it.
I 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 while getting something useful, and enough trace data to make further improvements.<p>Steve has gone "a bit" loopy, in a (so far) self aware manner, but he has some kind of insight into the software engineering process, I think. Yet, I predict beads will break under the weight of no-supervision eventually if he keeps churning it, but some others will pick up where he left off, with more modest goals. He did, to his credit, kill off several generations of project before this one in a similar category.
I haven't read the Yegge post closely, so just commenting that namespaces (or naming conventions) would make the easier-to-casually-read names more practical...<p>For example, if <i>Polecat</i> becomes <i>GasTown.WorkerAgent</i> (or <i>GasTown.Worker</i>), then you always have both an unambiguous way and a shorthand-in-context way of referring to the concept.<p>(For naming conventions when you don't have namespaces as a language feature, use prefixes within the identifier, such as `GasTown_Worker`.)<p>If <i>GasTown.Worker</i> is implemented with framework Foo, using that framework's <i>Worker</i> concept, <i>GasTown.Worker</i> might have a field named <i>fooWorker</i> of type <i>Foo.Worker</i>. (In the context of the implementation of GasTown, the unqualified name always means the GasTown concept, and you always disambiguate concepts from elsewhere that use the sane generic or similar terms.)<p>Complicated names like <i>GasTown.MaintenanceManagerCheckerAgent</i> might need some creative name shortening, but hopefully are still descriptive, or easy to pick up and remember. Or, if the descriptive and distinguishing name was complicated because the concept is a weird special case within the framework, maybe consider whether it should be rethought.
I think Yegge and Huntley are smart guys.<p>I don't think they're doing a good job incubating their ideas into being precise and clearly useful -- there is something to be said about being careful and methodical before showing your cards.<p>The message they are spreading feels inevitable, but the things they are showing now are ... for lack of better words, not clear or sharp. In a recent video at AI Engineer, Yegge comments on "the Luddites" - but even for advocates of the technology, it is nigh impossible to buy the story he's telling from his blog posts.<p>Show, don't tell -- my major complaint about this group is that they are proselytizing about vibe coding tools ... without serious software to show for it.<p>Let's see some serious fucking software. I'm looking for new compilers, browsers, OSes -- and they better work. Otherwise, what are we talking about? We're counting foxes before the hunt.<p>In any case, wouldn't trying to develop a serious piece of software like that _at the same time you're developing Gas Town or Loom_ make (what critics might call) the ~Emacs config tweaking for orchestration~ result driven?
Here's a separate, optimistic comment about Yegge and Huntley: they are obviously on the right track.<p>In a recent video about Loom (Huntley's orchestration tool), Huntley comments:<p>"I've got a single goal and that is autonomous evolutionary software and figuring out what's needed to be there."<p>which is extremely interesting and sounds like great fun.<p>When you take these ideas seriously, if the agents get better (by hook and crook or RLVR) -- you can see the implications: "grad student descent" on whatever piece of software you want. RAG over ideas, A/B testing of anything, endless looping, moving software.<p>It's a nightmare for the model of software development and human organization which is "productive" today, but an extremely compelling vision for those dabbling in the alternative.
It's a science project. I think the "I am so crazy" messaging is deliberate to scare most people away while attracting a few like-minded beta testers. He's telling you not to use it, which some people will take as a dare...
The overuse of metaphors makes me feel like this person is trying to reinvent Chef, but for AI.
Steve Yegge used to have interesting, albeit long winded, things to say re software.
I actually love the idea of totally new naming schemes for experimental software.<p>Certain name types are so normalized (agent, worker, etc) that while they serve their role well, they likely limit our imagination when thinking about software, and it's a worthwhile effort to explore alternatives.
I do too, but you can take things too far, which I'd argue has happened the moment "figuring out what the names mean" becomes enough of an intellectual challenge to provide a dopamine hit; at that point, you've (intentionally or otherwise) germinated a cult. It's human nature: people will support the design not on its merits but rather as loss aversion for the work they put into decoding it.
Anyone have some kind of central hub of finding out about new tools/techniques? I'm convinced that headless multi-agent coordination is the way to go, but it needs a lot of guard rails, one of the biggest of which will be cost-control. I'm sure there will be a lot more developments in this space, but I don't want to just happen across them by accident...
This entire thing is like a smart crazy person building something that sounds useful but is also crazy. I am entirely out of the loop (by choice) of the whole Claude Code AI coding "buddies" so maybe I just don't know enough to see this as (genius | completely worthless | other). I don't think that Steve yegge, who I am mildly aware of, is actually insane so I assume this is either him trolling hard or just the result of using AI chatbots.<p>I'm not saying we're in Terry Davis literal schizophrenia territory but it doesn't seem "normal".
Very minor nit -- crew could be a person also - in fact that's how you're supposed to hack on a codebase in gas town directly - add yourself as crew.<p>Other than that, this is a helpful list especially for someone who hasn't been hacking around on this thing as it's in rapid development mode. I find gas town super interesting, and tantalizingly close to being amazingly useful. That said, I wouldn't mind a slightly less 'flavored' set of names for workers.
> Persistent Worker Agents, which you talk to directly (not through the Mayor),<p>I had a bit of a chuckle.<p>I think there is value in anything approximating a proposer-verifier loop, but I don't know that this is the most ideal approach.
Maintenance Manager Checker Agent and the rest of the nouns Yegge employs are ironic given his Kingdom of Nouns essay.
At some point evolving software instead of designing it will work. Now the evolutionary pressure leads towards churning more tokens.
It's like Conway's Law. Both humans and agents arrive at roughly identical hierarchies for organizing labor. There is something inherent in the game of telephone required by limited working memory that requires this structure. Gas Town's only failure is not being familiar with prior art and coming up with very strange names for established patterns that already exist in large hierarchical organizations like governments, corporations and militaries.
Gas Town wasn't satire?