This is people having fun with a new technology that is far from perfect, is full of unknowns, but is ripe for exploration and discovery.
Gas Town itself is a piece of speculative fiction: throwing out a hypothesis as to what might be possible were inference to drastically drop in price. Its supervisor + isolated worker + merge factory approach is an experimental spike into how agentic coding could play out at scale.
And funnily enough, it is also the approach that Anysphere arrived at through their own experimentation.
Karpathy's alien technology metaphor is particularly apt. No one knows how to use these tools properly yet. We're having some success and a lot of fun, but really we're only going to find out by experimenting in public and sharing our results. Which means the positive and negative.
I will say that Gas Town is the most maximalist approach I’ve seen to accounting for the myriad flaws of current generation agents, essentially treating them as cattle and seeing if something of worth can be gained from a sort of brute force approach. I think that’s interesting, and I’m glad that someone built a (somewhat) working system to show what happens if you do that, because no one has built something like this (in public) before.
Overall I think it’s way better to think about this as a big gift basket full of ideas. Take the ones you like, regift the almonds to your cousin if you don’t like them. If someone sees me eating Gas Town banana cream truffle and goes “ZOMG, I NEED TO BUY $GAS NOW.” then that’s their problem, as neither Steve Yegge nor I are telling them to do that.
Yeggie very explicitly states that Gas Town is for people who give zero shits about how much money they're forking over to their LLM company. If I remember correctly, he said that he had to get a second entire account because of how much money he was spending.
I make this point to say, if someone were to try to claim this approach as IP we should expect it to be denied right?
Gastown is fun in the same way time cube is.
If it smells like bullshit and looks like bullshit there's little need to eat it to make sure it tastes like bullshit too.
Not in a dunk style reply. Just more: you fail to see it.
Or in the future will we look at the current time as the Wild West, the time when software moved more swiftly than the law. Where oil was there for anyone with a big enough guns to protect it.
Maybe we will experience our own butlerian jihad and realize that the thinking machines were controlling us the whole time. We will look at TikTok how we now look at the proliferation of ether in the 1800s.
Most software is in this category, but now we are being honest about it and can make it without paying a team of four for a year.
It's just par for the course in our attention economy. Like another poster had said, quite a bit of this is just simple experimentation that occurs.
This is obviously in a blip in the grand scheme of things but it is just an indication what all of these social media platforms are destined to become without some sort of intervention.
My understanding it was a very quick rebrand due to Anthropic sending a takedown notice so theres still references to the old name.
I saw at least 2-3 security reports as well pointing to various critical vulnerability.
Looked at the source as well - it makes zero sense. A lot of random commits. I suspect it would be trivial to introduce a backdoor the way this project is managed.
Too many red flags.
I would personally not touch this project.
Made it a bit more accessible certainly but the problem here lies squarely on the crypto side here in my mind.
Founding startups is about making money, but I believe it's possible to be too cynical about that; it doesn't leave enough room for people who sincerely believe in the vision they're selling. It's possible to believe your own hype.
It did a really good job with some prompting for fixes along the way. Turns out, it's really hard to individually ID people who are basically wearing the same thing and with similar colors.
All that is to say, I used it for an hour to see if my idea would work and be feasible.
The article just seems like yet another “look at all the hype around AI coding agents! Since we know AI coding doesn’t work, they must be a scam!” but with a garnish of “crypto is involved in some ancillary way! So watch out!”
That would certainly be preferable to the flood of AI-fueled monoliths predicted by this author. But maybe I'm being too optimistic.
But I would argue this is as old as the tides, it's just been accelerated by:
1) effectively unregulated gambling in the form of crypto tokens,
2) AI acceleration that the average person is too uneducated (sorry, it's true) to understand or evaluate the capabilities of and
3) pervasive, high-speed unregulated social media that props up insane technological claims and often outright lies for financial gain -- at least long enough and loud enough until the dump
You won't believe the PR schemes that brilliant insiders cook on Telegram for gullible audiences on Twitter, but it's not my story to tell here.
The only reason this has come to software is that ai slop coding has advanced the point where people who have no clue what they are doing with computers but know how to hype up an audience have learned "one weird trick to optimize rugpulls", and normies haven't yet realized they are the suckers at the table (or they haven't lost enough money yet for the bandwagon to move on to the next scam).
All of this actually makes me very sad as a person who's been working in AI + crypto for the better part of a decade because I think the tech is cool. Alas, you cannot beat the capitalist machine or underestimate people's greed or what they will do when given anonymity and freedom from reprecussions.
I’m sure there’s a tremendous long tail of scam attempts these days, but I’d be surprised if crypto scams haven’t already seen their high watermark in terms of actual victims.
Definitely not. Those people were already famous. And famous people turning their fame into cash has always been a thing.
Not that I condone...