Fences, Not Sandboxes

ttosh about 5 hours ago 16 commentsRead Article on yegge.ai

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Discussion (16 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

nepthar•about 1 hour ago

(Asking sincerely in good faith - I read this note along with skimming a few of the linked ones, and I'm familiar with gastown)

Can someone explain the value calculation to me? This seems like someone has truly let AI VASTLY expand the codebase of what seems to be a medium sized hobby game to ~10-100x the amount of engineering required. Especially with statements about how wheelhouse, his software factory, has grown to nearly the size of the actual software he's writing. He also mentions several times that wheelhouse is specific to developing the game. Then, he discusses "pulling in beads" which itself seems on my read to be enormously engineered. (note that he also says that you burn a lot of tokens with agents "keeping your beads in sync" and I didn't have the time to figure out what that meant, but it looks like as complicated as it is, beads can't reconcile itself without burning $$$).

It seems like if you answer "yes" at every time you have the question of "can I make AI do this", you end up burning $120k/month in tokens on your side project.

Again, I am not disparaging this- but I feel like I am genuinely missing something and would welcome help understanding it.

FinnLobsien•41 minutes ago

I guess this is a question of what you believe code and software engineering writ large is for.

If you believe that good engineering practice matters (in the sense that your software is maintainable, efficient, etc.), then this is horrific because the human has no idea what’s going on and any attempt to fix something by hand would probably uncover enough complications to make you consider rewriting from scratch.

But if your only qualifier is “does it do what I want it to do?” then this is perfectly fine. If you throw out the assumption that a human will ever maintain the code or need to understand it, then who cares if your main branch is full of unused code and it’s outrageously complex.

In a way, I guess this is a similar moment to abstract painting in the early 20th century.

If your assumption was that the point of a painting is to accurately capture a landscape or person, then abstract paintings are an abomination.

If you believe paintings should evoke a feeling and depicting people or landscapes are only one way to get there, you can throw out all the sketching and composing and painting technique.

watwut•8 minutes ago

Meh, the actual complaint is that it does not really do what it should and keeps burning those $$$ as you ask it to fix this or that.

jshaqaw•18 minutes ago

The proof is (or isn't) in the game. If the game is something genuinely great then this all worked and is important. If the game is a bloviated, boring, and derivative mess then it didn't. Without any proof point on the output it is hard to say if the article has any value.

xnx•about 1 hour ago

> First, my secret: I see the future by living in it. I am spending the equivalent of $122k/month of API token spend, or about $4,000 per day, using 21 Claude Max accounts, a number that has been growing steadily at 2 per week.

Good to know that together, Yegge and Zitron bring balance to the force.

mccoyb•about 1 hour ago

> I am running an organization of around 50-60 agents, five of whom are interfacing with around 10 humans in the outside world: myself, my 5-person core game design team, my accountant, my chief of staff, and a few others. Only Fable is allowed to talk to humans, via Slack and email.

RIP to those poor humans. I can't imagine having your brain melted by Fablespeak as your FTJ.

grebc•about 1 hour ago

Yegge’s writing has declined proportionately to his AI usage.

AloysB•3 minutes ago

I genuinely wonder if he has completely lost touch with reality. He seems to slowly become the Terry A. Davis of LLMs.

BeetleB•about 1 hour ago

I used to read his stuff ~20 years ago. He has cool things to say, but his writing always sucked.

I often write lengthy pieces. Then I look at it and say "Oh no, I don't want to become Steve Yegge!"

CoolestBeans•about 2 hours ago

What is the overhead to have agents play model UN? Why is the coordination so elaborate? It sounds like a deeply complex and expensive emergent behavior that maybe looks comprehensible but could be nonsensical. Also like any complex system, can you actually predict the outcomes?

Waste is a failure case. How do we know the code factory is actually productive or just agents filling up the computation resource cap because they can?

kodoman•about 1 hour ago

Yeah I have noticed lots of agent stuff recently seems to be spin as many agents up as possible have a whole office of agents. Just keep spinning more AI bastards up, give names to your AI bastards not descriptive names human names, set up email messages for your AI bastards and wonder why your stressed out that you have messages from Dave, Linda and Michael and the other Dave. I think a lot of this sort of thinking is probably going to cause mental exhausting and so wasteful. Steve is a intelligent guy but I find my self thinking the whole build an AI office or company thing is not going to be the way things work in the future and better harnesses and agents that are particularized with highly particularized tools and loop are where things are going to work better rather then lots of AI employees.

sneilan1•44 minutes ago

I'm glad someone is trying this and exploring what's possible. It's easy to deride his work by saying what's the value but are you running 50 fable agents and letting them run wild to see what the future looks like?

tediousgraffit1•27 minutes ago

I would if I had that kind of money!

coder-pm•about 2 hours ago

How do you find the bad decisions with so many subscriptions active? isn't that looking for needle in a haystack:)?

Avshalom•16 minutes ago

>This tier, or the one just after it, will power hundreds to thousands of new AI employees at every company.

>And companies are in no way, shape, or form prepared for this transition.

so, uh, what's the business model here?

BeetleB•about 1 hour ago

> I didn't want this to be a long post, and I think I've succeeded.

Classic Steve Yegge!