Welcome to Gas City

You know there are software which are so marvelously monumental, they inspire me to improve in my craft. Among them in no particular order

- The Witcher 3 (honorable mention, for all its jank, Skyrim) - Sublime Text and vim - Krita and Procreate - Early Google Chrome - Redis and Postgres

Seeing "steve-yegge.medium.com" on the HN frontpage averts me by reflex. Like, I'm suddenly inspired to learn more about agriculture. Or contracting, I heard that could be lucrative. Heck, I'd even go full hipster and open a bookshop in this economy.

Steve, you probably don't give a shit about my opinion but I just want to know from which Jamaican zip codes do you source your supply.

I feel like this should have had a warning like the one on the Epiphyte business plan in Cryptonomicon.

"EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING: Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets."

I really fundamentally do not understand what problem Gas City solves that is not already solved by normal subagent orchestration patterns. If you want to call your main LLM session the "mayor" and have it delegate its work out to planners and coders and reviewers and QA and so on, this is already a thing you can do! If you want to do this in a reusable way you can create skills and subagent definitions and use /commands, etc. Why do we need hundreds of thousands of lines of opaque Go code to accomplish any of this?

> So you should never just have one coding agent managing a piece of infrastructure. Not even for a low-stakes part of your business. You should always have at least two or three working together on a little crew.

I know why people think this, and I went down this route early on, but I’m not sure this logic follows.

Teams of agents, even adversarial ones reviewing work, are prone to the same types of mistakes as the problem they’re attempting to fix. In fact, mistakes at the adversarial/approval layer are so much worse, because the next stage assumes it was correct, and the error cascades. Maybe enough agents and tokens and context bring the probability of “correctness” closer to 1, but what is the judge of what is correct? what if that criteria is hallucinated?

I’m not sure this concept has been proven. I’ve certainly been unable to prove it to myself, and I’ve tried very hard.

If I want to create a furnace into which I can shovel tokens (ie: money) I dont think I can do it quite as elegantly as Gas City.

Its novel and funny, but the hype around agentic coding is bad enough for some engineers to think this represents the pinnacle of current software development practices.

I can't tell if this is the Piss Christ of the software (I hesitate to call it "development") world, or if we are watching a GG Allin show. It's sobering to watch people uncritically take cues from these Steve Yegge artifacts as though the software development enterprise had always been like this.

is there examples of the sort of things that's been built with these systems? it often feels like complication and abstraction for its own sake

i feel like the only way this post isn't depressing is if it's supposed to be funny

There still hasn't been anything concrete and useful built with this yet, right?

Perhaps the gas is from fermentation.

Is this just urbit all over again? Making up a bunch of terms and abstractions to make a mundane thing seem novel? At least in this case it seems more like psychosis than grift. In any case, I will be interested to see if this tooling yields any actual results, doesn't seem like it so far (except maybe more tooling lol).

This is so misguided, I don't even know where to begin. If you think that throwing more tokens at a problem with your agents cos-playing whatever fiction you cook up is the road to reliability, robustness and good design, you deserve all the misery that comes your way. If you want people to take this seriously, ground your ideas with rigorous data to prove that this works better than the state of the art. Until then, this is just irresponsible planet burning, token burning propaganda.

Came here to say that a lot of these LLM posts make me feel like I was hit by a hammer and I can't understand the world anymore. Thankfully, the HN comments confirm that this is as insane as I thought it was.

Hell yeah! Another episode of my favorite AI coding psychosis series!

i just want to write code, man

I find it somewhat damning that the examples are ChatGPT image slop and a massively long blog post no one can be arsed to read.

It makes it feel a little like Gas Town 2: Electric Boogaloo

Let me guess what comes next, Gas State? Where it’s just another larger iteration of the same thing