51 pointsby nop_slide6 hours ago30 comments
  • cadamsdotcom2 hours ago
    There are two bottlenecks in software.

    First is understanding what to build.

    Second is getting the details right.

    The best software is both the right software, and high quality. It’s bloody hard to do!

    So, we do requirements gathering, and try to get the details right (TDD, continuous delivery etc).. it’s surprising to see Gas Town do none of this and optimistically hope agents will converge on good software by just throwing tokens at a wall and hoping it sticks.

    So anyway, that’s what they’re ignoring. What are they actually doing???

    It’s all for themselves.

    Gas Town’s “product” is the warm fuzzies it gives people with money to burn, warm fuzzy feelings of being “at the frontier”. It’s a luxury product for nerds, and the only ones making money or selling anything are the big labs. There’s zero output or benefit to society because that’s simply not the point.

  • hardwaregeek6 hours ago
    I really want to host a vibe coding competition and see what can actually be made with these systems. Like if we’re doing insane token spends, it better be in service of creating amazing stuff. Can we make an entirely new programming language? Can we make an OS?
    • rustyboy5 hours ago
      That would be awesome to see! If there was some prize pool like $5,000 to build an operating system through vibe coding tools only and then people could stream themselves on twitch and you could have "sorts desk" type commentators who are collating all that together. I'd watch that and donate a hundred bucks.
    • steveklabnik5 hours ago
      > Can we make an entirely new programming language? Can we make an OS?

      I have seen both of these already. I've done the former personally, and I've seen links to at least kernels for the latter.

      (I didn't do it via gastown, just regular old "use Claude".)

      • hardwaregeek7 minutes ago
        That’d also be an interesting data point! What’s the upper limits of vibe coding? Can you vibe code rust? What about an entire programming language toolchain? How about an ecosystem? Can you make a parallel npm?
    • inerte4 hours ago
      Possible, yes. Easier? I tried to search for YouTube videos of people doing amazing things at blazing speed using Gas Town about a month ago, and couldn't find any. I for sure didn't want to spend hours reading and learning something that I don't know if it even works?

      Does anyone have like, projects built using it? I couldn't find "look at the output" types of videos or articles or repos, only "look at the input" types of posts about it.

    • karmakaze5 hours ago
      I would much prefer vibe-coding to be used at the highest layers, not the substrate that we all depend on.
    • avaer5 hours ago
      This sounds like a great idea, but I think two questions need to be asked for this to make sense:

        1) Who is organizing/arbitrating?
        2) Who is paying for the tokens? Is there some sort of funding or prize?
      
      I wish we could get to UBI so we don't have to ask those questions.
      • Etheryte5 hours ago
        In all honesty, if you scoped this well, one of the big players in the LLM space could definitely host a big marketing event on this spin. Get together a bunch of well known industry folks, have them vibe code a working <thing> in a given time constraint, presentations and prizes, lots of marketing.
    • xnx4 hours ago
      Crossing my fingers for an open source Chromium browser on Android with extensions enabled.
    • Sevii5 hours ago
      A lot of it seems to be porting open source projects to rust for other open source projects to consume.
    • ramesh315 hours ago
      >Can we make an entirely new programming language?

      This is trivial in a few hours with Claude Code

      • inerte4 hours ago
        I am designing one, aimed at Claude Code and other AI Coding Agents, and getting the first version lex/parser/compiler was an afternoon project. It was initially a TypeScript toolchain generating TypeScript code.

        I keep adding things here and there, a couple hours everyday. Then after about a week I decided to switch the toolchain from TypeScript to Rust, how much work? A 5 minute planning session and a ~20 minutes implementation phase.

        Trivial stuff indeed.

  • andrew_lettuce5 hours ago
    Feels like a missed opportunity to not use Blockchain for the reputational ledger. A throwback reference to quaint, olden times.
    • plagiarist4 hours ago
      I was thinking the same thing, should have put all the buzzwords together in one soup.
  • npilk5 hours ago
    With LLM-based tools that inherently rely so much on the semantics of language, I wonder if there will be differences in code generated for the "wanted board" in the "Wasteland", compared to the "task list" in the "public square" or the "wish list" in the "Utopia".
  • egypturnash5 hours ago
    "DoIt" looks like "Dolt" in all too many fonts.
    • rektomatic5 hours ago
      I legitametly thought it was Dolt until you pointed it out
    • mattnewton5 hours ago
      Wait it’s not Dolt? I assumed it was named in the same vein as “Git” when I read it
    • zachmu4 hours ago
      lol it's DOLT, not DoIt.

      Yegge's Medium uses a serif font so you can tell, but in many faces you can't.

      (We still get this comment constantly and it's very unfortunate)

    • block_dagger3 hours ago
      I literally thought it was "Dolt" until I read your comment.
  • nkzd5 hours ago
    I don't claim I am a good developer, but I seriously doubt any project which can't be explained with couple of sentences at most.
    • pocksuppet4 hours ago
      "We pay for 10000 AI bots and it makes awesome software, which is invisible and undetectable by anybody except me. It gives me a sense of pride and accomplishment."
    • plagiarist4 hours ago
      He's just verbose. "We added another layer of agentic orchestration on top of our existing layers, also now it's distributed."
  • citrusx2 hours ago
    Let's see...

    You can be part of the new reputation economy, IF you can afford Multiple Claude Max subscriptions and use all your tokens for it.

    Kind of like "getting good" at a collectible card game. It's more weighted toward whether you have money (and are willing to spend it) than anything else.

  • ozten3 hours ago
    Gas Town Wasteland is an elaborate growth hack for DoltDB
  • condensedcrab5 hours ago
    It's interesting progression from Gas Town, but it seems like the bottleneck is still translating ideas into actionable input/output frameworks for various agentic tasks.

    Also there's the issue of how to identify systems-interface problems and posting those tasks for completion as well. No guarantee that a totally federated system will not solve interfacial issues faster than they generate them without feedback and oversight.

  • RGamma4 hours ago
    Is this cyberpsychosis?
  • barrkel5 hours ago
    This has the feel of onanism, sorry.
  • dgathercole6 hours ago
    The name, at least, is fitting.
    • qsort5 hours ago
      ἀποθανεῖν θέλω
  • 4 hours ago
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  • alecbz5 hours ago
    I'm still choosing to believe this is all a joke.
    • bloggie4 hours ago
      Yesterday I wanted to change a white background to transparent on some clip art. I’m still learning Affinity so asked Google Gemini Nano Banana PRO 2. The output looked ok at first but the grey squares were a little off. They didn’t make a perfect grid. I opened it in mspaint and was able to erase the grey squares. It didn’t change the white background to transparent, it just drew an array of grey squares, but only good enough for a first glance. I have no idea how these AI tools can make anything of use if left to their own devices.
      • shepherdjerred3 hours ago
        I would've asked Claude Code to write a program to do it
      • block_dagger3 hours ago
        You're cherry picking.
      • 4 hours ago
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  • robotmaxtron5 hours ago
    This show has really lost the plot.
    • RGamma5 hours ago
      He can race with Stephen Wolfram: Is the universe really automata in disguise or Gas Towns? A couple "abstractions" up and he'll be there.
  • avaer5 hours ago
    What's the incentive for anyone to participate in this? It seems wildly expensive (in tokens), high mental overhead to understand, high hardware cost. So what's the upside?

    Is it for people with too much money and time on their hands to flex on Github?

    I could at least understand the pitch if there was a crypto scam attached, or if folks were getting paid somehow (which might be an interesting social/AI experiment). But that doesn't seem to be the case.

    • zachmu3 hours ago
      What's the incentive for people to contribute to an open source project?
  • conartist66 hours ago
    This just in, society is cooked guys! I know this sounds incredible to believe, but we don't need society anymore.
  • bambax5 hours ago
    > The Wasteland is a way to link thousands of Gas Towns together (...) to build stuff really, really fast. So fast that your biggest problem will be ideas.

    This reads like a speech from Pete Hegseth.

    "Let's do war! Hard! Let's build stuff! Stat!"

    Build what? Fight for what?

    "The hell if we know! Just get busy dropping bombs, or "stamps" or whatever! Faster!"

    In the end, all that's left is, indeed, a wasteland.

    • 5 hours ago
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  • corporat5 hours ago
    This is a classic example of a 'Solution in Search of a Metaphor.' Strip away the 5,000 words of Fury Road fan fiction and you’re left with a multi-agent wrapper for Claude Code that effectively automates the generation of technical debt. It feels like Yegge is trying to brand 'shoveling tokens into a furnace' as a new paradigm, but the cognitive overhead of learning his proprietary 'lore' just to manage a tmux session of LLMs is a massive net loss in productivity. We don't need a Wasteland; we need tools that actually improve the signal-to-noise ratio, not industrial-scale noise generators.
    • brendoelfrendo5 hours ago
      I think this is part of the point, perhaps? I get strong Urbit vibes from the Gastown fanfic. Take a relatively simple concept, but invent an entirely new vocabulary to describe it. It satisfies the creator's ego, and acts as a filter for non-believers. People need to buy in to the creator's vision and commit to learning the lingo in order to engage. People who don't get dismissed as lacking the capacity to understand. In other words, cult behavior.
      • tadfisher3 hours ago
        Can we fast-forward to the alien spaceships and kool-aid part?
  • throwup2386 hours ago
    > The Wasteland was designed for federating work, but its metamorphosis into an RPG seems unstoppable at this point.

    This is all just performance art at this point, right?

    • xnorswap5 hours ago
      I think so?

      I've not seen anyone take Gas Town seriously or even semi-seriously in the way people take Openclaw semi-seriously.

      Gas Town certainly seems like a concept for performance art. The original blog post read like it, and so does this.

    • benwad5 hours ago
      It reminds me of the time the band KLF burned £1 million in cash as a performance piece. They obviously regretted it afterwards.
    • jackyinger6 hours ago
      Waste… I can’t stop thinking about the waste of human talent and potential. The waste of resources to run AI data centers. The waste of the now old school CS ethos. Yea, wasteland checks out.
      • zingababba5 hours ago
        The future is wastemaxxing
        • RGamma4 hours ago
          Considering how disdainful our descendants may once look upon this time, we may as well hope it won't be remembered.
    • andrew_lettuce5 hours ago
      Or worse, public masterbation.
      • righthand5 hours ago
        But using the milking machines from A Boy and His Dog.
  • AstKaj5 hours ago
    AI got to Yegge,too. What the hell is "Gas Town" and why should I watch AI generated furry stuff?

    All I can take from this is that you must spend more tokens.

    • Ronsenshi5 hours ago
      AI got to him awhile ago, I'm afraid. Been telling stories about these gastowns, zero code review and thousands of lines of code and thousands of dollars in burned tokens since last year.
  • pron5 hours ago
    It's elegant because it's simple https://youtu.be/HHVPutfveVs
  • rbtprograms5 hours ago
    kinda reads like an advertisement for dolt?
    • cestith5 hours ago
      Dolt is definitely the most interesting thing mentioned to me.
    • verdverm4 hours ago
      dolt is cool until you hit merge conflicts, need non-simple migrations, or you have a process that ETLs data before putting it in dolt in bulk (huge changesets because one column changes in every row)

      separate company, not aware of any association, dolt has been around for a while

  • juancn4 hours ago
    I don't understand what this is about. What's a wasteland? What's a gas town?

    Is this Ethereum related?

    Help?

  • 5 hours ago
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  • samothrace5 hours ago
    Reads like a scam. Obfuscatory language, outsized claims on future impact, excited opportunity advertisement, first-mover advantage, "no time for the rulebook, it's an inch thick!".

    I'm good, thanks.

    • PaulHoule5 hours ago
      Hilarious too that he uses the word "wasteland" for something that's supposedly good. Perhaps it is a double coding where all of us normies mock it but the FOMO-blinded have their own private reading and say the rest of us are totally wrong.

      Reminds me of those 419 emails where the grammar is bad, the story makes no sense, but hey there really are people who expect $10 million to fall out of the sky because they already had $10 million fall out of the sky on them.

      • verdverm4 hours ago
        I find it amusing that the crypto crowd has yet to recognize their echo chamber and decided to bring it with them during their big pivot to ai. Their culture is offputting
  • DragonStrength5 hours ago
    Every Yegge post about AI reads like a Music Man style con job, but he’s got Silicon Valley startup founders salivating and pushing his book to their employees.
  • troupo5 hours ago
    People should stop giving Steve Yegge as much attention as they do.

    It's slop on top of slop on top of slop. It's not even quality slop. Apart from bloviated self-aggrandising blog posts, the ideas are trivial, and the execution is beyond horrendous.

    Look beyond the ChatGPT-generated terminology to see the supervisors, loops and worker processes of Gas Town. Now it's a freelance board with AI agents as freelancers. But sure, polecats, mayors, stamps and character sheets. Whatever floats your upcoming crypto rug pull [1].

    This is what he writes: "build stuff really, really fast. So fast that your biggest problem will be ideas." We've yet to see ideas built using the slopcoded monstrosities.

    [1] https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vib...

  • senordevnyc4 hours ago
    It's saddening to see folks here on HN direct so much contempt towards this. I have no intention of messing with Gas Town or Wasteland, but I think it's cool that folks like Steve with lots of money and time are using it to build stuff they find cool and interesting. I doubt these projects are the future of AI agent orchestration, but I do think they're probably going to help us collectively learn better how to work with AI.

    And if they don't, so what? Who cares? Why be angry at Steve for playing around with a fun hobby project that goes nowhere?

    • DragonStrengthan hour ago
      If you can point to single product he has made through his "vibe-coding" that isn't for "vibe-coding," I think they would all relent.
    • zachmu4 hours ago
      Regardless of whether this particular project goes anywhere, it's at least very interesting that Yegge has discovered a way to make multi-agent setups work better. Giving them discrete personas ("you are a senior database engineer with 30 years of experience") and narrower scopes makes them much more effective. This was surprising to me but makes a lot of sense in retrospect.
    • DragonStrength3 hours ago
      I see a lot of folks lamenting how Yegge has ignited a fire under leadership for egoless, factory worker style engineers. I don't think many would care much otherwise, but his post here is lamenting AI is not enough of a factory worker yet. On a site mostly populated by folks who put most of their lives into becoming skilled professionals, hearing "we think your work should be the kind of work we send to the cheapest, least-developed places on earth" like factory work is disheartening. Of course, it mostly seems like Yegge is here to make money off meme coins and selling Dolt plus his vibe-authored book, so why would anyone take this seriously?

      I mean, he can't explain what he's building except pickaxes to make more pickaxes, so it's a bit suspicious. It's just incredible how much impact he has had with this little hustle, given his products are basically turtles all the way down.

    • troupo2 hours ago
      > Why be angry at Steve for playing around with a fun hobby project that goes nowhere?

      People dislike scam artists, hype artists and bullshitters. Especially when said artists had something actually useful to contribute once upon a time. E.g. Yegge's Platform Rant [1] is still required reading IMO.

      Now he's uncritically and unapologetically pushes extremely low quality level AI slop while first trying to prop up Amp, then trying to sell a book, then trying to sell a crypto scam, now trying to sell a vibe-coded database. All the while proclaiming his projects have the basest of basic ideas but somehow need hundreds of thousands of lines of AI-generated low quality slop code to barely function.

      The contempt here is the same as for idiots who uncritically run clawdbot and other AI bullshitters and grifters.

      Compare this to @simonw who constantly evaluates coding agents, explains what he does in a coherent clear language that doesn't use ChatGPT to invent new inane terms for existing things, and stands behind his work and motivations: https://simonwillison.net

      [1] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611