Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale
maggieappleton.com361 points by pavel_lishin a day ago
361 points by pavel_lishin a day ago
I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment.
It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end.
And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and harumph at it for being Unprofessional and Not Serious and Not Ready For Production.
I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn't.
Maybe it's because we also have suits telling us we have to use neural nets everywhere for everything Or Else, and there's no sense of fun in that.
Maybe it's the natural consequence of large-scale professionalization, and stock option plans and RSUs and levels and sprints and PMs, that today's gray hoodie is just the updated gray suit of the past but with no less dryness of imagination.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
"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
Strong agreement with this. The whimsical, fantasy, fun, light hearted things are great until a large enough group of people take them as a serious life motto & then try to push it on everyone else.
Taking the example of the cryptocurrency boom (as a whole) as the guide, the problem is the interaction of two realities: big money on the table; and the self-fulfilling-prophecy (not to say Ponzi) dynamic of needing people to keep clapping for Tinker-bell, in greater and greater numbers, to keep the line going up. It corrupts whimsical fun and community spirit, it corrupts idealism, and it corrupts technical curiosity.
stevey already made $300K from cryptocurrency grift on Gas Town. Read his blog post about it.
what the? how do you sell crypto based on a description of an orchestration framework?
donations?
Complete with a "Let’s goooooooo!"
And FOMO stories about missing out on Bitcoin when he knew about it, so he doesn't want you to miss out on this new opportunity to get "filthy rich" as an "investor" while you still can.
I don't get crypto - just looked up how a couple of most performant stocks did in the past decade, and I'm pretty sure you could outperform BTC with the same amount of risk tolerance.
The swings on BTC price are absolutely insane, and ETH even more so (which is even more risky, without showing higher gains).
More details on the pump and dump scheme he joined in on promoting and drew money from: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vib...
I feel it's hard to criticize people for engaging in this anymore. Why would any reasonable person not take the free money?
In the past this would've been different when you couldn't necessarily expect all participants to be fully aware of what's going on, but absolutely nobody is treating "gas town" coins as a serious investment.
Why is it hard to criticize people for being part of a scam operation? It's so morally and ethically bankrupt that it's really easy and valid to criticize someone for