> But no need to wait. At a high level, Gas City is the answer to all your problems. Ha! At least, for certain classes of problem, such as, “How can I bring AI into my company and pass an audit trail,”
The important audit at my company is conducted by the FDA.
I have a feeling when they ask what processes we followed to mitigate any user harm that could be caused by software changes that "I told an AI-mayor in the form of a cartoon fox what to do and he spit out a bunch of vibecode software written by AI-driven virtual cartoon characters" is not among the answers they want to hear.
Ehhh in my experience compliance auditors are 10 behind the cutting edge. I still see auditors that don't understand Kubernetes and so ask the same questions they would about on prem machines. They don't know the questions to ask to get to the real meat of the risks. This leads them to allow things through that probably deserve more scrutiny. I bet the same thing will happen with LLM tools like this. They'll just ask if you use PRs and wave you on through.
I did an induction at some ISO certified company some years back, reading their docs. A good 50% of them contained significant content that basically read:
> the thing must be in the place where it should be
With no further information e.g. what place, where, how, when, who facilitates that?
> the person who facilitates it, is the person who facilitates it.
Yea thanks. So their ISO accredited process was basically no process. Would have been way better with a talking fox.
So I feel like humans are capable of just as bad. I'd be interested in what answer the Fox could spit out and I kinda wonder where it might fit on the bell curve of all non Gas-Town "auditable" processes. I'm all for skepticism but I feel like it would be more tangible if we instead criticised the response instead of just conjuring it as "definitely awful" because it happens to be on top of a generated stack.
I mean: I don't want it to work, but maybe we're not as good as we think we are, or the stuff we rate as super important is actually way less important with a generated context. As much as I love good code, the thought that gnaws at the back of my head is the truism that some of the most profitable code in history has been some of the "worst" code (e.g. MySpace's janky code base ontop of ColdFusion or Twitter's "Fail Whale" era).
So I'm happy that someone is exploring this space in an open way. I'm just glad I'm not the one finding that out with my face first.
Which ISO certification matters, but the key thing people should be aware of is that the primary value of the certification to customers is that your processes are documented and that deviations are tracked, so that customers can check whether the processes makes sense before signing a contract. It's important not to expect the certification itself to guarantee quality.
If its all obviously shit then it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe point Claude at it and ask it to find the most stupid stuff that you can then manually verify as being wtf.
My point is that just calling him names has no substance, but mocking his source specifically does.
> We're supposed to be engineers. Criticising a concept based on conjecture and insult is unbecoming of our culture.
The entire thing is nothing but conjecture. No real software has been produced by the concept to date, except more garbage software that takes hundreds of thousands of lines where a few thousand would do.
And to be clear, Beads and Gastown are unbecoming of our “culture” and any self respecting engineer would recoil in horror at the concept.
There are some good ideas in the tools. I hope our culture has room left for curiosity and exploration in that way. I also highly doubt these will catch on over one-shotting and Jira though. Here’s one quick thought from each:
Beads keeps the issue tracker state in git. This can only work if you don’t have a PR/Review-Gate to submitting patches (to file bugs/issues/etc) but I’ve found it unexpectedly helpful for personal projects. Helpful enough to entertain the idea in other contexts.
Gastown uses an AI Agent _as the orchestrator_, and to kick stalled agents, and, that’s such an obvious thing in hindsight I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it. I have adopted this in a few other contexts now.
Wow that's so innovative. I'm amazed Linus didn't think of that twenty years ago when he invented git.
Oh wait... It's been tried and discarded half a dozen times since then. Git is literally just a bunch of text files with a tree pointer. You can fit any data into it you want, but as it turns out, most people who report bugs don't want to use git to do so.
> Gastown uses an AI Agent _as the orchestrator_, and to kick stalled agents, and, that’s such an obvious thing in hindsight I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it. I have adopted this in a few other contexts now.
I too can't believe you didn't think of it. Literally can't believe it.
How is it conjecture when you just admitted you're aware of a repo with hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
Your argument belies a lazyness or skill issue. You abandon the possibility of proof to sling mud.
People have made a shit ton of economic value with shit code over the course of history of software and now that's accelerating with this sort of shite. I appreciate its ugly but i will not follow you by fashioning a duvet out of arrogance and throwing rocks people investigating the ugly.
What they're doing it at least an interesting spectacle and ill wait for the show to end before writing my review.
What it means is that it is easy to shit on other people's work. Much harder to give constructive criticism - especially on what looks like a throwaway account.
It’s not “other people’s work” because Steve didn’t do any work. He vibe coded hundreds of thousands of lines that don’t do what they’re supposed to with many thousands of lines of documentation that are inaccurate at best and aspirational at worst. He wrote some blog posts and got them picked up by vapid outlets that had nothing else to add to boost his exposure.
Case in point: no one talks about beads or gastown on HN because it’s crap that no one uses. Even *claw and that dumb fad get more mileage. meanwhile, CC vs Codex is an ever ongoing battle and Anthropic employees announce policy changes in “Tell HN” posts which stay on the front page for days.
If you actually follow the links you posted, you will see that he didn't create a meme coin and didn't rug pull it. Someone else made the coin and set it up so he got transfer fees.
Does Yegge really think that building production software this way is a good idea?
Let's assume that managing context well is a problem and that this kind of orchestration solves it. But I see another problem with agents:
When designing a system or a component we have ideas that form invariants. Sometimes the invariant is big, like a certain grand architecture, and sometimes it's small, like the selection of a data structure. Eventually, though, you want to add a feature that clashes with that invariant. At that point there are usually three choices:
* Don't add the feature. The invariant is a useful simplifying principle and it's more important than the feature; it will pay dividends in other ways.
* Add the feature inelegantly or inefficiently on top of the invariant. Hey, not every feature has to be elegant or efficient.
* Go back and change the invariant. You've just learnt something new that you hadn't considered and puts things in a new light, and it turns out there's a better approach.
Often, only one of these is right. Usually, one of these is very, very wrong, and with bad consequences.
But picking among them isn't a matter of context. It's a matter of judgment and the models - not the harnesses - get this judgment wrong far too often (they go with what they know - the "average" of their training - or they just don't get it). So often, in fact, that mistakes quickly accumulate and compound, and after a few bad decisions like this the codebase is unsalvageable. Today's models are just not good enough (yet) to create a complete sustainable product on their own. You just can't trust them to make wise decisions. Study after study and experiement after experiment show this.
Now, perhaps we make better judgment calls because we have context that the agent doesn't. But we can't really dump everything we know, from facts to lessons, and that pertains to every abstraction layer of the software, into documents. Even if we could, today's models couldn't handle them. So even if it is a matter of context, it is not something that can be solved with better context management. Having an audit trail is nice, but not if it's a trail of one bad decision after another.
I think a lot of it comes down to the training objective, which is to fulfill the user’s request.
They have knowledge about how programs can be structured in ways that improve overall maintainability, but little room to exercise that knowledge over the course of fulfilling the user’s request to add X feature.
They can make changes which lead to an improvement to the code base itself (without adding features); they just need to be asked explicitly to do so.
I’d argue the training objective should be tweaked. Before implementing, stop to consider the absolutely best way to approach it - potentially making other refactors to accommodate the feature first.
Beads is cool, but I tried to use it, and the backend didn't really make sense. I have to run an sql database in the background? How does it sync with Git? (I didn't see any files/objects committed to the repo) Plus, Dolt ended up using a constant 3-30kB/s of i/o in the background, while nothing was actually going on. That and Beads has a lot of features I'm not gonna use. All of this was just too complicated for my tiny brain.
So I slapped together my own Beads implementation (https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/dingles) over a day or two. Probably has bugs, and I'm sure race conditions if you tried to use with Gas Town, and likely does not scale. But it has the minimum functionality needed to create and track issues and sync them (locally and remotely, either via normal merge, or a dedicated ticket branch). No SQL, no extra features, just JSONL and Git. Threw a whole large software project at it, and the AI took to it like a duck to water, used it to make epics for the whole project, methodically worked through them all, dependencies first, across multiple context sessions. The paradigm of making tools the AI wants to use is clearly a winner.
Glad I'm not the only one using Gastown as a space heater. I filed an issue here and hope to find some time this week to research more: https://github.com/dolthub/dolt/issues/10849
I did the same thing, and had the same experience, but it also gave more of an appreciation for Beads' architecture. I think the weird redundancies actually made a lot of sense when I began to understand some of the edge cases where agents crap the bed.
Serious question - there's a lot of fluff talking about Gas Town, but has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting?
At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.
>At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.
I see this sentiment often, repeated a couple times in here, but I don't understand why on earth that would be the case. Gas Town was released a little over three months ago. It's an ongoing open-source experiment at the bleeding edge of vendor-agnostic multi-agent orchestration.
I was using gastown for fire-and-forget prototyping of larger projects. It was flaky and scorches tokens but it was able to get larger prototypes done than I could with a single instance of my daily river (claude) alone.
> Having spent six weeks or so using Gas Town across multiple simultaneous projects, I believe I can describe the shift concretely. The bottleneck migrates from coding speed to the rate at which you can generate ideas, write specifications, and validate outputs. You are no longer limited by how fast you can build. You are limited by how fast you can think.
Interesting:
> Kubernetes asks “Is it running?” Gas Town asks “Is it done?” Kubernetes optimizes for uptime. Gas Town optimizes for completion.
I’m not sure I find the testimony of a Bain & Company AI consultant (https://www.bain.com/our-team/eric-koziol/) to be compelling for anything outside of generating fees.
This sounds like every LLM workflow, which is 'you tell the LLM what you want'.
The real distinction is of scale - whether you want a REST endpoint or a fully functional word processor.
But real, actual, complex software is at least half spec (either explicit, or implicitly captured by its code), the question is, can LLMs specify software to the same degree with Gas Town, that you get something functioning?
You provided a quote from someone who seems to be an AI-boosting influencer who claimed to use it, but where's the output in the form of code we can look at, or in the form of an app someone can use today?
I'm not an AI-denier. I use LLMs and agentic coding. They increase my productivity.
...but there is still a very real problem with people claiming that some new way of using AI is earth shattering, and changes everything based on vague anecdotes that don't involve a tangible released output that they can point to.
Yeah if this can truly just autonomously make great software, then where is all the new SaaS that is able to undercut incumbents by charging 10-20% of what they are charging?
you can always fire it up yourself and see what its all about. in my experience it generates a lot of code very quickly, that code is probably only ever supposed to be LLM maintained, not by people.
I don't think the op meant Gas Town itself (if they did, my bad), but what has Yegge done with Gas Town? By now it should have released some amazing thing if Gas Town increases productivity so much.
What has Yegge done with Gas Town? Well for one, he has posted a bunch of blog content about it which has generated chatter like this and increased his geek mindshare.
Just because he's operating in the realm of smart nerds doesn't mean he is immune to the value-inverting effects of social media.
(btw I've been wondering the same thing as you and am not sure if there's another answer besides that he and people following his projects keep building projects on their projects: Beads, to Gas Town, to Wasteland, etc.)
This is my experience as well. At work, our team is 50/50 on 'mastery' of current AI tools. All of us using parallel agentic workflows have our own flavor of tooling. I'm not convinced there's an agreement yet on what the 'ideal' is here, so experimentation is where it's at. Over-indexing on a massively complex system like Gastown for professional work seems unwise. Lots of us have used it for fun at home though.
If the post does not have any use-cases proving value then perhaps this is something yet to be validated, i.e. the burden on the users, not the creators.
In an era where creating such libraries is much cheaper than validating that they're useful or work, yeah you really should validate it before you expect someone to use it. Nobody is going around trying out every slop project they see, they'd be wasting hours and hours for no gain at all.
This all being said, I do find the idea interesting, but heeded it's advice when it said it's hideously expensive and risky to use. So yes, I do want someone braver, richer, and stupider than me to take the first leap
You’re very good at this! I have trouble slopping out more than a day or two!
Treat this like art. There are some neat ideas, maybe not executed particularly well. Somewhere around 7/10 IMDB score. The working implementation makes the blog post more impactful more than the other way around.
If it was art, I would find it really quite neat. However it doesn't seem intended as such:
> Gas Town “just works.” It does its job, it has tons of integration points, and it has been stable for many weeks. People are using it to build real stuff.
I loved Beads, but kept running into issues because it is so git heavy. One: not every system and project I work on uses git. Two: Sometimes I'd switch branches, and that would screw up Beads state entirely. Three: And this is at least last I used it, there's no safety net, Claude would close a Bead, without validating anything.
I wound up building my own with Claude, I made it SQLite first, syncs to GitHub, can pull down from GitHub, and I added "Gates" to stopgap Claude or whatever agent from marking things complete if they've not been: compiled, unit tests run, or simple human testing / confirmation. The Gates concept improved my experience with Claude, all too often it says it finished something, when in fact it did not. Every task must have a gate, and gates must pass before you can close a task. Gates can be reused across tasks, so if "Run unit tests" is one gate, you can reuse it for every task, when it passes, it passes for that one task <-> gate combination.
Anyway, I'm happy for Beads, Gas Town not so much my wheelhouse on the other hand.
I have not, and at this point its too late for me to do so, I've already invested in my project that does what Beads did for me with some features I really wanted.
How did you implement gates? Are they simply tasks Claude itself has to confirm it ran, or are they scripts that run to check that the thing in question actually happened, or do they spawn a separate AI agent to check that the thing happened, or what?
Claude or whatever agent will get a message when it tries to close a task, which tells them which gates are not resolved yet, at which point, the agent will instinctively want to read the task. I did run into an issue where I forgot to add gates to a new project, so Claude did smoosh over by making a blanket gate, I have otherwise never had an issue when I defined what the gate is, Claude usually honors it. I havent worked on big updates recently, but I noticed other tools like rtk (Rust Token Killer) will add their own instructions to your claude's instructions.md file, so I think I need to craft one to tack on with sane instructions, including never closing tasks without having the user create gates for them first.
In a nutshell, a gate is a entry in the DB with arbitrary text, Claude is good about following whatever it is. Claude trying to close a task will force it to read it.
Life's gotten slightly busy, but you can see more on the repo. I've been debating giving it a better name, I feel like GuardRails implies security, when the goal is just to validate work slightly.
I suppose, I mean the LLM is still reading it, the issue is, Beads gives the model a task, and then the model finishes, and never checks anything. I kept running into this repeatedly, and sometimes I'd go to compile the project after it said "hey I finished" it wouldn't compile at all, where if it would have just tried to build the project, it would have just worked.
You can't trust it 100%. Sometimes it will just refuse to fix a compiler or lint warning (often saying "This was a pre-existing issue...") or write a trivial test that does nothing and always passes.
I'm not saying you shouldn't. I'd say 70% of my work code is written by Claude Code or Codex. But this is something you should be aware of when interacting with agents.
I built something similar with verifiable gates tasks. The agent has a command to mark the task as done and it will run the bash script, if it passes the task closes, if it doesn’t it appends the failure information into the task description for the agents next attempt at the task.
Gas Town has always struck me as more of a performance art piece than a tool that was actually meant to be used, even among the recent hyped AI projects. If you’re using it for real, what are you using it for?
Gas Town really feels not just vibe coded but also vibe designed.
I looked into it, to see whether multi agent setups really made a difference, the entire design philosophy feels like it was « let’s add one more layer of agent and surely this time it will work » about 10 times in a row.
So now you have agents of type mayor, polecats, witnesses, deacons, dogs etc plus a slew of
Unneeded constructs with incomprehensible names.
In one of the blog post for gas town I remember reading something by the author along the lines of « it’s super inefficient, but because you burn so many tokens, you still get what you want at the end! » clearly this is also the design philosophy behind this project, just (get your ai to) throw more random abstractions and more agent types until you feel like it kinda works, don’t bother asking yourself if they actually contribute anything.
This gave me the very clear feeling that most of the complexity of gas town is absolutely not needed and probably detrimental.
Ended up building my own thing that is 10x simpler, just a simple main agent you talk to, that can dispatch subagents, they all communicate, wake each other up and keep track of work through a simple CLI. No « refinery » or « wasteland » or « molecule » or « convoys » or « deacons » or …
> Ended up building my own thing that is 10x simpler, just a simple main agent you talk to, that can dispatch subagents, they all communicate, wake each other up and keep track of work through a simple CLI. No « refinery » or « wasteland » or « molecule » or « convoys » or « deacons » or …
You won't get 10k stars and a blog post out of that. Obviously you need some Stoats who have Conferences with the Stump Lord to determine whether they are needed at the Silo or the Bilge. They'll then regroup at the appropriate Decision Epicenter and delegate to the Weasels and Chipmunks who actually do the coding (antiquated term) in the Salt Mine.
Except you don't have agents of "type" you have the same claude running everywhere with the same system prompt and no guardrails.
First time I tried gas town (after finding the exact combination of dolt and beads that work; flake.nix was out of date and didn't work), "mayor" started implementing things.
Sure, author can build a whole gas city using gas town, but I don't get how anyone other than the author can use it.
Nice timing. I was just noting that beads in an old repo, just ... worked. Updates worked, I didn't have super weird errors to track down... I was like "nice!" Beads bumping to 1.0 is great. I haven't used gas town in a month or so, but a stable gas town sounds very valuable.
I think Yegge's instincts that making a programmable / editable coordination layer (he calls this gas city) is a great idea. Gas town early days was definitely a wild experience in terms of needing to watch carefully lest your system be destroyed, and then I put that energy into OpenClaw - I'll probably spin up Gas City and see what it can do soon though. Very cool.
I'm pretty excited about agentic coding myself, but this does appear to be an extended ai-psychosis (i'm not super comfortable with this phrase, but it is becoming pretty recognisable).
I think he's boxed himself in by continually layering more complexity on his approach, rather than stepping back and questioning the fundamentals or the overall direction.
All of the steps Gas Town or Gas City etc are taking are towards reducing human oversight and control. This is profoundly misguided! In a world of infinite cheap software it is precisely this human decision making and control that matters.
> There will be nothing like it. You are going to want to use Gas City.
No. I do not want to talk to the mayor of my software factory, as its cartoonish minions build an infinite mountain of slop. Unreviewable, both in terms of code and the finished product.
Instead, I want to precisely capture human ideas, have those ideas questioned, challenged, improved, and then I want to bring those ideas to life, keeping the human in the loop whenever they want. Neither Beads, Gas Town, nor Gas City or anything like them are required for that.
Building harnesses does seem like a task that's particularly conductive to psychosis. I've wondered if it's because there is no push-back; almost anything you try will be "right" in that your changes appear to make things happen. "Oh look I added a carpenter and now it's walking around and making notes about the scaffolding" So you get to stay in your flow state without reassessing if the concepts you are forming are ultimately meaningful.
Although I think the post also self-diagnoses some factors that also help:
With the Gas Town Mayor, you feel like you’re operating at a special level, a VIP, above all the workers. You are talking to someone important: the mayor of a factory the size of a town. You have access to someone with resources, someone who gets you, someone who appreciates how busy you are.
Working with regular coding agents just doesn’t give you that special feeling.
I think at this point it’s all but confirmed that LLMs sycophantic tendencies coupled with yes-man attitudes produce AI psychosis and AI fanaticism. Especially if you’re already of high opinion of yourself (be it deserved or not).
> All of the steps Gas Town or Gas City etc are taking are towards reducing human oversight and control. This is profoundly misguided!
I mostly agree with you other than this one sentence.
Let's say you're building the literal antithesis of Gastown: an AI agent software specifically designed to be human reviewed and monitored. How to you make this as efficient as possible? Well, it's by ensuring high quality results from human oversight and control while spending the least amount of time. Which to be precise, is still reducing human oversight and control per unit of useful work done.
It's really about granularity - when I'm building something there are parts of the system where I want very fine-grained control and oversight over what is built and how, and there are others where... it just doesn't really matter. What matters to who is contextual - a software architect tends to care about different things from a product manager for example. This is the idea of gradual specification - I should be able to defer some decisions to the AI and exercise full control over other aspects, but it's the humans that should be able to choose what level they want to work at.
For "hacker" news, this group is reacting like its "labor" news. I get it - this will have an impact on the current ways of building software getting deprecated.
But this is genuinely cutting-edge, new paradigm of building software. Something that will iron it's kinks out, and potentially be the way of developing software in the new Era. That's worth some curious and exploratory discussion, rather than more comments about not being the "true way of software development".
(Sorry, was put off by the crab-pulling down discussion.)
I feel this way too, HN has a lot of negative posters for some reason, I'd really like to find another forum with a better vibe or see the vibe improve here
Reading about Gas Town has been fun, it's definitely an experiment and may not be practical and doesn't have to be; it does seem to be a possible correct vision of the future of coordinating agents to code with (it's just not fully there yet as it is on the cutting edge of seeing what's possible)
The climate crisis is primarily a consequence of fossil fuels, not necessarily energy demand. I feel like its a poor conflation, despite it possibly being a truism depending on where the datacentre is based and what power source feeds it.
If we're keeping gas and coal plants online to power this or using gas generators to power data centers, I'd consider that a wasteful contributing factor.
but we could also argue that not investing in extra non-fossil fuel capacity is the issue here. OR not investing in more research on super conductors and/or storage. Iceland could possibly export considerable amounts of renewable energy if we licked those problems.
I mean, under the same logic couldn't we kinda argue that TV has ruined the planet? A lot of energy for something of debatable physical value. OR Motor racing, football, The Olympic games? All that energy and waste just to find out who can throw a stick the furthest every four years.
My experience is that Agentic Coding can legitimately get you mostly-working software. You do, however, still need to spend a few days groking, validating, and usually nudging/whacking it to conform to the shape you intended vs what the agent inferred.
It is pretty magical to go from brainstorming an idea in the evening, having ChatGPT Pro spit out a long list of beads to implement it, leaving it running over night in a totally empty repo and waking up to a mostly-implemented project.
It's magical until you start going through the code carefully, line by line, and find yourself typing at the agent: YOU DID WHAT NOW? Then, when you read a few more lines and realise that neither AI nor human will be able to debug the codebase once ten more features are added you find yourself typing: REVERT. EVERYTHING.
yes, this is an issue i see too... also fixing it up takes alot of time (sometimes more if i just 'one-shotted' it myself)... idk these tools are useful, but i feel like we are going too far with 'just let the ai do everything'...
I tried Beads and it kept breaking in such frustratingly random ways that I just added a Linear MCP server and called it a day. That's really all you need.
I've been using Beads for 5 different projects, and Beads and/or Dolt failures have been a regular thing. It's own "doctor" feature is sort of disturbing, in that it (1) tells me that my Beads setups are always at least a little bit broken, but (2) can never fix all of the issues. Hopefully the 1.0 designation means that Steve is out of "throw shit at the wall" mode. Beads is fine as a replacement for Markdown files, but I'll never go near Gas Town because of my experience with it.
Agreed. I kinda concluded that the expected `doctor` usage is to have an agent run it for you and then they can try to figure it out when `doctor` can’t fix the issues.
I think there’s other HN threads reporting multiple issues with it. Can’t remember which thread I read it but someone said it’s very hard to uninstall because agents will keep reinstalling it once it’s part of a project.
I tried both Beads and Gas Town and had the same experience.
These fully vibe coded tools seem to have near zero QA. The fact that they ship with a `doctor` command that you regularly need to run (even if you didn’t change anything about your environment) tells you all you need to know.
I searched on google about the cost of running Gas Town. The Gemini AI response claimed Gas town costs $100 / hour and can spit out 4000 lines of code per hour, so Gas Town costs 2.5 cents per line of code.
I tried tracking down where those numbers came from and the sources were a bit sketchy. Can anybody who has used Gas Town confirm those numbers, or report their personal numbers?
I think the point is that we are given no real idea at all, not even some ballpark figures, about how much actual money actually needs to be spent in order to run Gas Town. The original article had some handwavy stuff about how it cost An Awful Lot, but no actual numbers.
Cost per line of code is not an amazing metric, but at least it's an attempt to come up with a figure.
(I would also be interested to find out how much it costs to run...)
I hear what you’re saying, and I agree it would be nice to know, but I’ve also firmly bucketed this as “if you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it”.
Well, yes ideally we would eventually also have metrics about error rates and reject rates. Like ideally at some point someone could do a study of "for every 100 PRs Gas Town generates, how many are accepted after code review and how many are rejected" or "for every 100 lines of code Gas Town generates, how many coding errors are detected by human reviewers".
Unfortunately I think things are moving so fast that by the time such a study was done, we would already be on to newer models and newer versions of gas town.
i've experimented quite a lot with multi agent setups and orchestrations.
In the end, it didn't feel worth it mostly because of high token overhead (inter agent communications, agents re reading same code, etc...) and synchronization / cooperation issues (who should do what).
What actually works for me and provides good results: multi step workflows with clearly defined steps and strong guidance for the agent.
I don't know if Gastown will work out. But it is quite a bold take. I am interested to see how it plays out. I suspect they will eventually roll back some of the stringent "no code reading" approach in favor of observability as the community grows.
Also I chuckled at the AI-generated "The Overseer is Alnays Right | Vacation Approved" poster in the background of the split image where the mayor is reading so you can supervise. This has strong Boondocks Catcher Freeman vibes. I want to hear the polecats/badgers' version.
> I’ve been saying since last year that by the end of 2026, people will be mostly programming by talking to a face. There’s absolutely NO reason to type with the Mayor. You should be able to chat with them like a person. You’ll have a cartoon fox there onscreen, in costume, building and managing your production software, and showing you pretty status updates whenever you ask for one. This is the end state for IDEs.
This is a desirable end state for highly social but perhaps slightly sociopathic extroverts who want to spend all day talking even though they aren't talking to a person.
For anyone else, it's hard to imagine considering that a desirable way to spend eight hours a day.
>This is a desirable end state for [a category of people] who want to spend all day talking even though they aren't talking to a person.
When I am not in actual meetings, I do already spend all day talking to anthropomorphized facets of my personality that represent software architecture, security paranoia, operational practicality, user experience, etc. Often not by speaking aloud, but it's a conversation nonetheless.
So yes, this sounds absolutely grand.
EDIT: But I don't think it should be forced on everyone! Having the option to use the tools that work best for you should be the goal.
Set a budget. Fund an openrouter account with the max you can stomach spending on this test and give it a shot.
At least, that’s what I would do, if I had any interest in testing out gastown with my own money. If my employer wants to pay for the testing, that’s another question entirely.
No. He used to be good with ideas. Now he's drinking too much of his own poison. His blog posts are bloviated monstrosities incapable of coherently describing the very trivial ideas contained in them.
I cannot really get behind Gas Town or any other “agent swarm” setup. They always seem to waste an incredible amount of tokens on passing the buck around as half-finished specs, and even with a healthy amount of tokens pre-allocated they burn money faster than setting my wallet on fire…
I feel Gastown is an attempt at answering: what if i push the multi-agent paradigm to its chaotic end?
But I think the point that Yegge doesn't address and that I had to discover for myself is: getting many agents working in parallel doing different things -- while cool and exciting (in an anthromorphic way) -- might not actually be solving the right problem. The bottleneck in development isn't workflow orchestration (what Gastown does) -- it's actually problem decomposition.
And Beads doesn't actually handle the decomposed problem well. I thought it did. But all it is is a task-graph system. Each bead is task, and agents can just pick up tasks to work on. That looks a lot like an SDE picking up a JIRA ticket right? But the problem is embedding just enough context in the task that the agent can do it right. But often it doesn't, so the agent has to guess missing context. And it often produces plausible code that is wrong.
Devolving a goal into the smaller slices is really where a lot of difficulty lies. You might say, oh, "I can just tell Claude to write Epics/Stories/Tasks, and it'll figure it out". Right? But without something grounding it like a spec, Claude doesn't do a good job. It won't know exactly how much context to provide to each independent agent.
What I have found useful is spec-driven development, especially of the opinionated variety that Kiro IDE offers. Kiro IDE is a middling Cursor, but an excellent spec generator -- in fact one of the best. It generates 3 specs at 3 levels of abstraction. It generates a Requirements doc in EARS/INCOSE (used at Rolls Royce and Boeing for reducing spec ambiguity), and then generate a Design doc (commonly done at FAANG), and... then generates a Task list, which cross-references the sections of the requirements/design.
This kind of spec hugely limits the degrees of freedom. The Requirements part of the spec actually captures intent, which is key. The Design part mocks interfaces, embeds glossaries, and also embeds PBTs (property-based tests using Hypothesis -- maybe eventually Hegel?) as gating mechanisms to check invariants. The Task list is what Beads is supposed to do -- but Beads can't do a good job because it doesn't have the other two specs.
I've deployed 4 products now using Kiro spec-driven dev (+ Simon Willison's tip "do red/green tdd") and they're running in prod and so far so good. They're pressure-tested using real data.
Spec-driven development isn't perfect but I feel its aim is the correct one -- to capture intentions, to reduce the degrees of freedom, and to constrain agents toward correctness. I tried using Claude Code's /plan mode but it's nowhere as rigorous, and there's still spec drift in the generated code. It doesn't pin down the problem sufficiently.
Gastown/Beads are solutions for workflow orchestration problem (which is exciting for tech bros), but at its core, it's not the most important problem. Problem decomposition is.
Otherwise you're just solving the wrong problem, fast.
Getting sucked into a crypto scam and then deciding to get out, despite the death threats(!)[1] is not a rug pull.
To be clear, the BAGS scam coin he got sucked into is a extractive zero-sum game where someone else creates a coin named after him, offers him trading commission to talk about it and then makes money off the hype.
He did the correct thing by leaving.
(I worked for a bit at a Web3 place. Went in with an open mind and now have opinions)
> someone else creates a coin named after him, offers him trading commission to talk about it and then makes money off the hype
And we are supposed to believe that someone deep in tech, in 2026, did not know this was going to be the end goal? Was $GAS supposed to be a crypto to help fund poor farmers in Burundi or something ? How else is the meme coin #16352813 supposed to end? That’s the entire point of meme coins.
Would love to also « get sucked » into making 300k$.
> Would love to also « get sucked » into making 300k$.
Exactly.
It seems harmless - "look, we have this token, it is being traded anyway, do you want to get some of the emissions?"
Who wouldn't say "yes" to that free money.
But it's not clear at all how corrupting the crypto scam is, and how subtly the corruption seeps into what you do. It starts by "oh can you just tweet out about this" and you are "sure - it's just a tweet" and slowly grows.
Steve Yegg deserves credit for walking away from it.
yeah its kind of sad, because people have to then re-evaluate others they heard about who they also didn't believe the apologies of at the time
like the Hawk Tuah girl, or the Enron relaunch long form comedy routine that wound up with a short lived crypto token, and pretty much anyone with 15 minutes of fame or celebrities that drop a contract address
for the most part, they themselves actually are the victims of a roving band of deployers running the crypto launch convincing them they're part of something, and of course, the consumers have the choice of never getting involved
but the deployers are the ones that should face some form of accountability, or at least the public eye
To me, no, not quite. I'll give him one free pass. More like "I'll coast on this pulled rug to see what happens" than that he did the rug pull. Not a very wise thing to do, but not malicious either.
The description on Wikipedia looks like somebody else created a memecoin in his honor, sent him the profits, and he accepted them? And the only people harmed were people who invest in random memecoins? I don't understand the problem.
I'm a long-time Steve Yegge fan but a major Gas Town hater (now Gas City too, I guess). It's doubling down on all the wrong metaphors.
I also simply detest how Gas Town is modeled fundamentally on an extractive and destructive metaphor, the 19th century factory. I want to live in a verdant software garden, not a dystopian industrialist hellscape.
In my view the StrongDM guys are on the right long-term path.
> But no need to wait. At a high level, Gas City is the answer to all your problems. Ha! At least, for certain classes of problem, such as, “How can I bring AI into my company and pass an audit trail,”
The important audit at my company is conducted by the FDA.
I have a feeling when they ask what processes we followed to mitigate any user harm that could be caused by software changes that "I told an AI-mayor in the form of a cartoon fox what to do and he spit out a bunch of vibecode software written by AI-driven virtual cartoon characters" is not among the answers they want to hear.
Keep in mind investing in cartoon foxes was a "business strategy" a lot of (otherwise serious) people bought into in 2020-2021.
And those cartoon foxes didn't even do anything! I guess these ones do?
Don't put it past the masses. These are crazy times.
The influence of cartoon foxes on business strategies in tech has a long history and cannot be overstated.
https://poignant.guide/book/chapter-3.html
Ehhh in my experience compliance auditors are 10 behind the cutting edge. I still see auditors that don't understand Kubernetes and so ask the same questions they would about on prem machines. They don't know the questions to ask to get to the real meat of the risks. This leads them to allow things through that probably deserve more scrutiny. I bet the same thing will happen with LLM tools like this. They'll just ask if you use PRs and wave you on through.
I did an induction at some ISO certified company some years back, reading their docs. A good 50% of them contained significant content that basically read:
> the thing must be in the place where it should be
With no further information e.g. what place, where, how, when, who facilitates that?
> the person who facilitates it, is the person who facilitates it.
Yea thanks. So their ISO accredited process was basically no process. Would have been way better with a talking fox.
So I feel like humans are capable of just as bad. I'd be interested in what answer the Fox could spit out and I kinda wonder where it might fit on the bell curve of all non Gas-Town "auditable" processes. I'm all for skepticism but I feel like it would be more tangible if we instead criticised the response instead of just conjuring it as "definitely awful" because it happens to be on top of a generated stack.
I mean: I don't want it to work, but maybe we're not as good as we think we are, or the stuff we rate as super important is actually way less important with a generated context. As much as I love good code, the thought that gnaws at the back of my head is the truism that some of the most profitable code in history has been some of the "worst" code (e.g. MySpace's janky code base ontop of ColdFusion or Twitter's "Fail Whale" era).
So I'm happy that someone is exploring this space in an open way. I'm just glad I'm not the one finding that out with my face first.
Which ISO certification matters, but the key thing people should be aware of is that the primary value of the certification to customers is that your processes are documented and that deviations are tracked, so that customers can check whether the processes makes sense before signing a contract. It's important not to expect the certification itself to guarantee quality.
Not yet... but me in 2020 telling you what the HN frontpage 2026 would look like you would have sent me to a mental institution, wouldn't you?
Same institution I’d send Steve today.
The sanatorium from American Horror Story Asylum comes to mind.
Dominique, nique, nique…
we can do better than "that man is crazy". Why not pull up a line in his OPENLY AVAILABLE CODE BASE and mock that instead?
Beads, his glorified CLI based work tracker, was over several hundred thousand lines of code, last I checked in January.
Where do I even begin to mock that except at the source? That’s just absolute insanity.
If its all obviously shit then it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe point Claude at it and ask it to find the most stupid stuff that you can then manually verify as being wtf.
My point is that just calling him names has no substance, but mocking his source specifically does.
> If its all obviously shit then it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe point Claude at it and ask it to find stupid stuff.
What does that even mean? Am I supposed to point Claude at garbage code bases? All it will find is garbage.
> My point is that just calling him names has no substance, but mocking his source specifically does.
He is the source. He wrote this stuff under his own volition.
We're supposed to be engineers. Criticising a concept based on conjecture and insult is unbecoming of our culture.
> We're supposed to be engineers. Criticising a concept based on conjecture and insult is unbecoming of our culture.
The entire thing is nothing but conjecture. No real software has been produced by the concept to date, except more garbage software that takes hundreds of thousands of lines where a few thousand would do.
And to be clear, Beads and Gastown are unbecoming of our “culture” and any self respecting engineer would recoil in horror at the concept.
There are some good ideas in the tools. I hope our culture has room left for curiosity and exploration in that way. I also highly doubt these will catch on over one-shotting and Jira though. Here’s one quick thought from each:
Beads keeps the issue tracker state in git. This can only work if you don’t have a PR/Review-Gate to submitting patches (to file bugs/issues/etc) but I’ve found it unexpectedly helpful for personal projects. Helpful enough to entertain the idea in other contexts.
Gastown uses an AI Agent _as the orchestrator_, and to kick stalled agents, and, that’s such an obvious thing in hindsight I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it. I have adopted this in a few other contexts now.
> Beads keeps the issue tracker state in git.
Wow that's so innovative. I'm amazed Linus didn't think of that twenty years ago when he invented git.
Oh wait... It's been tried and discarded half a dozen times since then. Git is literally just a bunch of text files with a tree pointer. You can fit any data into it you want, but as it turns out, most people who report bugs don't want to use git to do so.
> Gastown uses an AI Agent _as the orchestrator_, and to kick stalled agents, and, that’s such an obvious thing in hindsight I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it. I have adopted this in a few other contexts now.
I too can't believe you didn't think of it. Literally can't believe it.
We’re all at different points along this path. Today, I was one of the lucky 10000. I hope you get to be in that group again in the future too.
How is it conjecture when you just admitted you're aware of a repo with hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
Your argument belies a lazyness or skill issue. You abandon the possibility of proof to sling mud.
People have made a shit ton of economic value with shit code over the course of history of software and now that's accelerating with this sort of shite. I appreciate its ugly but i will not follow you by fashioning a duvet out of arrogance and throwing rocks people investigating the ugly.
What they're doing it at least an interesting spectacle and ill wait for the show to end before writing my review.
> You abandon the possibility of proof to sling mud.
> i will not follow you by fashioning a duvet out of arrogance and throwing rocks people investigating the ugly.
Seriously?
What it means is that it is easy to shit on other people's work. Much harder to give constructive criticism - especially on what looks like a throwaway account.
It’s not “other people’s work” because Steve didn’t do any work. He vibe coded hundreds of thousands of lines that don’t do what they’re supposed to with many thousands of lines of documentation that are inaccurate at best and aspirational at worst. He wrote some blog posts and got them picked up by vapid outlets that had nothing else to add to boost his exposure.
Case in point: no one talks about beads or gastown on HN because it’s crap that no one uses. Even *claw and that dumb fad get more mileage. meanwhile, CC vs Codex is an ever ongoing battle and Anthropic employees announce policy changes in “Tell HN” posts which stay on the front page for days.
The deluge of manure we're drowning in is nerve-wracking and desensitizing. I hardly look at HN any more because it's 90% AI crap now.
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cos it proves that he's wrong for not looking at it, thus undermining the very principle of what he's trying to do.
I don't need to touch and taste a pile of shit, to identify a pile of shit.
If that is a foreign concept, I hope to god that you have excellent health insurance.
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If you actually follow the links you posted, you will see that he didn't create a meme coin and didn't rug pull it. Someone else made the coin and set it up so he got transfer fees.
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"every 5th article is about no-code-solutions that sometimes work" might be unexpected but it's hardly the stuff of institutionalization.
Among the general population, no. Among a population of coders, it should be the stuff of institutionalization.
> The important audit at my company is conducted by [Trump's second term] FDA.
Could work
Does Yegge really think that building production software this way is a good idea?
Let's assume that managing context well is a problem and that this kind of orchestration solves it. But I see another problem with agents:
When designing a system or a component we have ideas that form invariants. Sometimes the invariant is big, like a certain grand architecture, and sometimes it's small, like the selection of a data structure. Eventually, though, you want to add a feature that clashes with that invariant. At that point there are usually three choices:
* Don't add the feature. The invariant is a useful simplifying principle and it's more important than the feature; it will pay dividends in other ways.
* Add the feature inelegantly or inefficiently on top of the invariant. Hey, not every feature has to be elegant or efficient.
* Go back and change the invariant. You've just learnt something new that you hadn't considered and puts things in a new light, and it turns out there's a better approach.
Often, only one of these is right. Usually, one of these is very, very wrong, and with bad consequences.
But picking among them isn't a matter of context. It's a matter of judgment and the models - not the harnesses - get this judgment wrong far too often (they go with what they know - the "average" of their training - or they just don't get it). So often, in fact, that mistakes quickly accumulate and compound, and after a few bad decisions like this the codebase is unsalvageable. Today's models are just not good enough (yet) to create a complete sustainable product on their own. You just can't trust them to make wise decisions. Study after study and experiement after experiment show this.
Now, perhaps we make better judgment calls because we have context that the agent doesn't. But we can't really dump everything we know, from facts to lessons, and that pertains to every abstraction layer of the software, into documents. Even if we could, today's models couldn't handle them. So even if it is a matter of context, it is not something that can be solved with better context management. Having an audit trail is nice, but not if it's a trail of one bad decision after another.
I think a lot of it comes down to the training objective, which is to fulfill the user’s request.
They have knowledge about how programs can be structured in ways that improve overall maintainability, but little room to exercise that knowledge over the course of fulfilling the user’s request to add X feature.
They can make changes which lead to an improvement to the code base itself (without adding features); they just need to be asked explicitly to do so.
I’d argue the training objective should be tweaked. Before implementing, stop to consider the absolutely best way to approach it - potentially making other refactors to accommodate the feature first.
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Some people care about the craft, most care about the output...
Hang in there, there will be a lot of slop to fix in contract work...
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Beads is cool, but I tried to use it, and the backend didn't really make sense. I have to run an sql database in the background? How does it sync with Git? (I didn't see any files/objects committed to the repo) Plus, Dolt ended up using a constant 3-30kB/s of i/o in the background, while nothing was actually going on. That and Beads has a lot of features I'm not gonna use. All of this was just too complicated for my tiny brain.
So I slapped together my own Beads implementation (https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/dingles) over a day or two. Probably has bugs, and I'm sure race conditions if you tried to use with Gas Town, and likely does not scale. But it has the minimum functionality needed to create and track issues and sync them (locally and remotely, either via normal merge, or a dedicated ticket branch). No SQL, no extra features, just JSONL and Git. Threw a whole large software project at it, and the AI took to it like a duck to water, used it to make epics for the whole project, methodically worked through them all, dependencies first, across multiple context sessions. The paradigm of making tools the AI wants to use is clearly a winner.
Agreed that beads seems way over engineered for an issue tracker.
It was ok until he bolted on Dolt
Glad I'm not the only one using Gastown as a space heater. I filed an issue here and hope to find some time this week to research more: https://github.com/dolthub/dolt/issues/10849
I did the same thing, and had the same experience, but it also gave more of an appreciation for Beads' architecture. I think the weird redundancies actually made a lot of sense when I began to understand some of the edge cases where agents crap the bed.
Serious question - there's a lot of fluff talking about Gas Town, but has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting?
At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.
> has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting?
No.
>At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.
I see this sentiment often, repeated a couple times in here, but I don't understand why on earth that would be the case. Gas Town was released a little over three months ago. It's an ongoing open-source experiment at the bleeding edge of vendor-agnostic multi-agent orchestration.
I was using gastown for fire-and-forget prototyping of larger projects. It was flaky and scorches tokens but it was able to get larger prototypes done than I could with a single instance of my daily river (claude) alone.
> Gas Town was released a little over three months ago
Should be plenty of time for a 100x zero-shot vibe god.
> Having spent six weeks or so using Gas Town across multiple simultaneous projects, I believe I can describe the shift concretely. The bottleneck migrates from coding speed to the rate at which you can generate ideas, write specifications, and validate outputs. You are no longer limited by how fast you can build. You are limited by how fast you can think.
Interesting:
> Kubernetes asks “Is it running?” Gas Town asks “Is it done?” Kubernetes optimizes for uptime. Gas Town optimizes for completion.
https://embracingenigmas.substack.com/p/exploring-gas-town
I’m not sure I find the testimony of a Bain & Company AI consultant (https://www.bain.com/our-team/eric-koziol/) to be compelling for anything outside of generating fees.
Does this mean you would avoid an article on PostgreSQL if it's from a company selling Postgres products or consultation?
It means they'd avoid an article on the benefits of smoking if it's posted by a company selling cigarettes.
This seems to be an AI-generated post where the "author" never reveals building any successful product or even tangible project with Gas Town.
It's like Web 4.0 zombo.com
"You can build anything with Gas Town! The only limit is yourself!"
edit: was "is your imagination". Changed to fully match https://genius.com/Zombo-zombocom-lyrics
Oh man, we can't even say yourself anymore.
“Yourself” still has to pay for tokens!
This sounds like every LLM workflow, which is 'you tell the LLM what you want'.
The real distinction is of scale - whether you want a REST endpoint or a fully functional word processor.
But real, actual, complex software is at least half spec (either explicit, or implicitly captured by its code), the question is, can LLMs specify software to the same degree with Gas Town, that you get something functioning?
This doesn't really answer the question...?
You provided a quote from someone who seems to be an AI-boosting influencer who claimed to use it, but where's the output in the form of code we can look at, or in the form of an app someone can use today?
I'm not an AI-denier. I use LLMs and agentic coding. They increase my productivity.
...but there is still a very real problem with people claiming that some new way of using AI is earth shattering, and changes everything based on vague anecdotes that don't involve a tangible released output that they can point to.
Yeah if this can truly just autonomously make great software, then where is all the new SaaS that is able to undercut incumbents by charging 10-20% of what they are charging?
I don't use LLMs and I never use agentic coding. And I too am interested in an answer to this question.
>Kubernetes asks “Is it running?” Gas Town asks “Is it done?” Kubernetes optimizes for uptime. Gas Town optimizes for completion.
Sounds like the typical AI post slop.
you can always fire it up yourself and see what its all about. in my experience it generates a lot of code very quickly, that code is probably only ever supposed to be LLM maintained, not by people.
I don't think the op meant Gas Town itself (if they did, my bad), but what has Yegge done with Gas Town? By now it should have released some amazing thing if Gas Town increases productivity so much.
What has Yegge done with Gas Town? Well for one, he has posted a bunch of blog content about it which has generated chatter like this and increased his geek mindshare.
Just because he's operating in the realm of smart nerds doesn't mean he is immune to the value-inverting effects of social media.
Don't forget: also using his name and the project to pump some speculative crypto nonsense of which he was a beneficiary.
How anybody takes him (or the Ralph Wiggum guy who did the same) seriously after this is beyond me. These people should be exiled
He's now tried to create a board of a bunch of Gas Towns called "The Wasteland": https://wasteland.gastownhall.ai/
(btw I've been wondering the same thing as you and am not sure if there's another answer besides that he and people following his projects keep building projects on their projects: Beads, to Gas Town, to Wasteland, etc.)
>doesn't mean he is immune to the value-inverting effects of social media.
Or those of hype, e.g. AI hype.
I think the main thing he's produced using Gas Town is Gas Town itself.
> you can always fire it up yourself and see what its all about
I imagine it doesn't run very cheaply.
Name checks out
> that code is probably only ever supposed to be LLM maintained, not by people.
But LLMs are trying to mimic people. So if confusion is the human response, what's to stop the llm from acting confused?
A mechanical ability to look at the code without having a judgement.
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>Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting?
I am very confident in saying that most individuals successfully using multiple agents have done so by building their own harness.
This is my experience as well. At work, our team is 50/50 on 'mastery' of current AI tools. All of us using parallel agentic workflows have our own flavor of tooling. I'm not convinced there's an agreement yet on what the 'ideal' is here, so experimentation is where it's at. Over-indexing on a massively complex system like Gastown for professional work seems unwise. Lots of us have used it for fun at home though.
If the post does not have any use-cases proving value then perhaps this is something yet to be validated, i.e. the burden on the users, not the creators.
Why would the onus on the value prop be on the user?
There should be no shortage of examples the creator could provide, unless of course...
You're prompting it wrong!
In an era where creating such libraries is much cheaper than validating that they're useful or work, yeah you really should validate it before you expect someone to use it. Nobody is going around trying out every slop project they see, they'd be wasting hours and hours for no gain at all.
This all being said, I do find the idea interesting, but heeded it's advice when it said it's hideously expensive and risky to use. So yes, I do want someone braver, richer, and stupider than me to take the first leap
Corollary: if the post does have use-cases providing value, this is something yet to be validated and the value is just imagine by the author
Wym? I can slop out 100 libraries/frameworks/packages/cli's a day, the onus is not on other people to prove that they are useful.
You’re very good at this! I have trouble slopping out more than a day or two!
Treat this like art. There are some neat ideas, maybe not executed particularly well. Somewhere around 7/10 IMDB score. The working implementation makes the blog post more impactful more than the other way around.
If it was art, I would find it really quite neat. However it doesn't seem intended as such:
> Gas Town “just works.” It does its job, it has tons of integration points, and it has been stable for many weeks. People are using it to build real stuff.
I loved Beads, but kept running into issues because it is so git heavy. One: not every system and project I work on uses git. Two: Sometimes I'd switch branches, and that would screw up Beads state entirely. Three: And this is at least last I used it, there's no safety net, Claude would close a Bead, without validating anything.
I wound up building my own with Claude, I made it SQLite first, syncs to GitHub, can pull down from GitHub, and I added "Gates" to stopgap Claude or whatever agent from marking things complete if they've not been: compiled, unit tests run, or simple human testing / confirmation. The Gates concept improved my experience with Claude, all too often it says it finished something, when in fact it did not. Every task must have a gate, and gates must pass before you can close a task. Gates can be reused across tasks, so if "Run unit tests" is one gate, you can reuse it for every task, when it passes, it passes for that one task <-> gate combination.
Anyway, I'm happy for Beads, Gas Town not so much my wheelhouse on the other hand.
Did you try using `git worktree`? https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree
I have not, and at this point its too late for me to do so, I've already invested in my project that does what Beads did for me with some features I really wanted.
Love this.
How did you implement gates? Are they simply tasks Claude itself has to confirm it ran, or are they scripts that run to check that the thing in question actually happened, or do they spawn a separate AI agent to check that the thing happened, or what?
Claude or whatever agent will get a message when it tries to close a task, which tells them which gates are not resolved yet, at which point, the agent will instinctively want to read the task. I did run into an issue where I forgot to add gates to a new project, so Claude did smoosh over by making a blanket gate, I have otherwise never had an issue when I defined what the gate is, Claude usually honors it. I havent worked on big updates recently, but I noticed other tools like rtk (Rust Token Killer) will add their own instructions to your claude's instructions.md file, so I think I need to craft one to tack on with sane instructions, including never closing tasks without having the user create gates for them first.
In a nutshell, a gate is a entry in the DB with arbitrary text, Claude is good about following whatever it is. Claude trying to close a task will force it to read it.
Life's gotten slightly busy, but you can see more on the repo. I've been debating giving it a better name, I feel like GuardRails implies security, when the goal is just to validate work slightly.
https://github.com/Giancarlos/GuardRails
It sounds like a gate is a prompt that shows up at the appropriate time, which works because LLM’s pay more attention to the last thing they read.
It seems like a lot of coding agent features work that way?
I suppose, I mean the LLM is still reading it, the issue is, Beads gives the model a task, and then the model finishes, and never checks anything. I kept running into this repeatedly, and sometimes I'd go to compile the project after it said "hey I finished" it wouldn't compile at all, where if it would have just tried to build the project, it would have just worked.
From my understanding the way Gas Town uses beads is that it's not only "what to do" but also contains a workflow.
Who closes the gate? Is it Claude itself after it runs the verification? Who makes sure the verification did in fact run?
I usually have Claude confirm with me but I've seen it close it if its a unit test that passed for example.
You can't trust it 100%. Sometimes it will just refuse to fix a compiler or lint warning (often saying "This was a pre-existing issue...") or write a trivial test that does nothing and always passes.
> writes code with a lot of warnings > compacts > "This was a pre-existing issue..."
I still take this over writing code myself though.
I'm not saying you shouldn't. I'd say 70% of my work code is written by Claude Code or Codex. But this is something you should be aware of when interacting with agents.
Point being that there are multiple gates to one story, including human testing as one of them.
I built something similar with verifiable gates tasks. The agent has a command to mark the task as done and it will run the bash script, if it passes the task closes, if it doesn’t it appends the failure information into the task description for the agents next attempt at the task.
Gas Town has always struck me as more of a performance art piece than a tool that was actually meant to be used, even among the recent hyped AI projects. If you’re using it for real, what are you using it for?
Gas Town really feels not just vibe coded but also vibe designed. I looked into it, to see whether multi agent setups really made a difference, the entire design philosophy feels like it was « let’s add one more layer of agent and surely this time it will work » about 10 times in a row.
So now you have agents of type mayor, polecats, witnesses, deacons, dogs etc plus a slew of Unneeded constructs with incomprehensible names.
In one of the blog post for gas town I remember reading something by the author along the lines of « it’s super inefficient, but because you burn so many tokens, you still get what you want at the end! » clearly this is also the design philosophy behind this project, just (get your ai to) throw more random abstractions and more agent types until you feel like it kinda works, don’t bother asking yourself if they actually contribute anything.
This gave me the very clear feeling that most of the complexity of gas town is absolutely not needed and probably detrimental.
Ended up building my own thing that is 10x simpler, just a simple main agent you talk to, that can dispatch subagents, they all communicate, wake each other up and keep track of work through a simple CLI. No « refinery » or « wasteland » or « molecule » or « convoys » or « deacons » or …
> Ended up building my own thing that is 10x simpler, just a simple main agent you talk to, that can dispatch subagents, they all communicate, wake each other up and keep track of work through a simple CLI. No « refinery » or « wasteland » or « molecule » or « convoys » or « deacons » or …
You won't get 10k stars and a blog post out of that. Obviously you need some Stoats who have Conferences with the Stump Lord to determine whether they are needed at the Silo or the Bilge. They'll then regroup at the appropriate Decision Epicenter and delegate to the Weasels and Chipmunks who actually do the coding (antiquated term) in the Salt Mine.
The Stump Lord is an owl.
Reminds me of Urbit the completely exotic computer network
That's fully veered into cult territory.
I have no idea if this is a real thing or a joke, but it was hilarious! That’s where we are I guess
Except you don't have agents of "type" you have the same claude running everywhere with the same system prompt and no guardrails.
First time I tried gas town (after finding the exact combination of dolt and beads that work; flake.nix was out of date and didn't work), "mayor" started implementing things.
Sure, author can build a whole gas city using gas town, but I don't get how anyone other than the author can use it.
Nice timing. I was just noting that beads in an old repo, just ... worked. Updates worked, I didn't have super weird errors to track down... I was like "nice!" Beads bumping to 1.0 is great. I haven't used gas town in a month or so, but a stable gas town sounds very valuable.
I think Yegge's instincts that making a programmable / editable coordination layer (he calls this gas city) is a great idea. Gas town early days was definitely a wild experience in terms of needing to watch carefully lest your system be destroyed, and then I put that energy into OpenClaw - I'll probably spin up Gas City and see what it can do soon though. Very cool.
I'm pretty excited about agentic coding myself, but this does appear to be an extended ai-psychosis (i'm not super comfortable with this phrase, but it is becoming pretty recognisable).
I think he's boxed himself in by continually layering more complexity on his approach, rather than stepping back and questioning the fundamentals or the overall direction.
All of the steps Gas Town or Gas City etc are taking are towards reducing human oversight and control. This is profoundly misguided! In a world of infinite cheap software it is precisely this human decision making and control that matters.
> There will be nothing like it. You are going to want to use Gas City.
No. I do not want to talk to the mayor of my software factory, as its cartoonish minions build an infinite mountain of slop. Unreviewable, both in terms of code and the finished product.
Instead, I want to precisely capture human ideas, have those ideas questioned, challenged, improved, and then I want to bring those ideas to life, keeping the human in the loop whenever they want. Neither Beads, Gas Town, nor Gas City or anything like them are required for that.
Building harnesses does seem like a task that's particularly conductive to psychosis. I've wondered if it's because there is no push-back; almost anything you try will be "right" in that your changes appear to make things happen. "Oh look I added a carpenter and now it's walking around and making notes about the scaffolding" So you get to stay in your flow state without reassessing if the concepts you are forming are ultimately meaningful.
Although I think the post also self-diagnoses some factors that also help:
I think at this point it’s all but confirmed that LLMs sycophantic tendencies coupled with yes-man attitudes produce AI psychosis and AI fanaticism. Especially if you’re already of high opinion of yourself (be it deserved or not).
I’ve wondered whether this is all supposed to be a satire on the industry. But unintentional self-parody is also a possibility.
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> All of the steps Gas Town or Gas City etc are taking are towards reducing human oversight and control. This is profoundly misguided!
I mostly agree with you other than this one sentence.
Let's say you're building the literal antithesis of Gastown: an AI agent software specifically designed to be human reviewed and monitored. How to you make this as efficient as possible? Well, it's by ensuring high quality results from human oversight and control while spending the least amount of time. Which to be precise, is still reducing human oversight and control per unit of useful work done.
It's really about granularity - when I'm building something there are parts of the system where I want very fine-grained control and oversight over what is built and how, and there are others where... it just doesn't really matter. What matters to who is contextual - a software architect tends to care about different things from a product manager for example. This is the idea of gradual specification - I should be able to defer some decisions to the AI and exercise full control over other aspects, but it's the humans that should be able to choose what level they want to work at.
For "hacker" news, this group is reacting like its "labor" news. I get it - this will have an impact on the current ways of building software getting deprecated.
But this is genuinely cutting-edge, new paradigm of building software. Something that will iron it's kinks out, and potentially be the way of developing software in the new Era. That's worth some curious and exploratory discussion, rather than more comments about not being the "true way of software development".
(Sorry, was put off by the crab-pulling down discussion.)
I feel this way too, HN has a lot of negative posters for some reason, I'd really like to find another forum with a better vibe or see the vibe improve here
Reading about Gas Town has been fun, it's definitely an experiment and may not be practical and doesn't have to be; it does seem to be a possible correct vision of the future of coordinating agents to code with (it's just not fully there yet as it is on the cutting edge of seeing what's possible)
The original Beads, it seems, used my CGO-free SQLite driver.
Seems like I'm back to obscurity.
:)
You got relegated to a stack of dirty stacked up crates, according to the genAI article images.
An apt name for something doing it's part to spike energy consumption and accelerate the climate crisis.
The climate crisis is primarily a consequence of fossil fuels, not necessarily energy demand. I feel like its a poor conflation, despite it possibly being a truism depending on where the datacentre is based and what power source feeds it.
If we're keeping gas and coal plants online to power this or using gas generators to power data centers, I'd consider that a wasteful contributing factor.
but we could also argue that not investing in extra non-fossil fuel capacity is the issue here. OR not investing in more research on super conductors and/or storage. Iceland could possibly export considerable amounts of renewable energy if we licked those problems.
I mean, under the same logic couldn't we kinda argue that TV has ruined the planet? A lot of energy for something of debatable physical value. OR Motor racing, football, The Olympic games? All that energy and waste just to find out who can throw a stick the furthest every four years.
I suppose one could, but none of those are primary economic drivers with dim prospects for turning a profit (well, I suppose that may be true of TV).
My experience is that Agentic Coding can legitimately get you mostly-working software. You do, however, still need to spend a few days groking, validating, and usually nudging/whacking it to conform to the shape you intended vs what the agent inferred.
It is pretty magical to go from brainstorming an idea in the evening, having ChatGPT Pro spit out a long list of beads to implement it, leaving it running over night in a totally empty repo and waking up to a mostly-implemented project.
It's magical until you start going through the code carefully, line by line, and find yourself typing at the agent: YOU DID WHAT NOW? Then, when you read a few more lines and realise that neither AI nor human will be able to debug the codebase once ten more features are added you find yourself typing: REVERT. EVERYTHING.
yes, this is an issue i see too... also fixing it up takes alot of time (sometimes more if i just 'one-shotted' it myself)... idk these tools are useful, but i feel like we are going too far with 'just let the ai do everything'...
I tried Beads and it kept breaking in such frustratingly random ways that I just added a Linear MCP server and called it a day. That's really all you need.
I've been using Beads for 5 different projects, and Beads and/or Dolt failures have been a regular thing. It's own "doctor" feature is sort of disturbing, in that it (1) tells me that my Beads setups are always at least a little bit broken, but (2) can never fix all of the issues. Hopefully the 1.0 designation means that Steve is out of "throw shit at the wall" mode. Beads is fine as a replacement for Markdown files, but I'll never go near Gas Town because of my experience with it.
Agreed. I kinda concluded that the expected `doctor` usage is to have an agent run it for you and then they can try to figure it out when `doctor` can’t fix the issues.
I think there’s other HN threads reporting multiple issues with it. Can’t remember which thread I read it but someone said it’s very hard to uninstall because agents will keep reinstalling it once it’s part of a project.
YMMV but this seems like a simpler port: https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/beads_rust
I tried both Beads and Gas Town and had the same experience.
These fully vibe coded tools seem to have near zero QA. The fact that they ship with a `doctor` command that you regularly need to run (even if you didn’t change anything about your environment) tells you all you need to know.
I searched on google about the cost of running Gas Town. The Gemini AI response claimed Gas town costs $100 / hour and can spit out 4000 lines of code per hour, so Gas Town costs 2.5 cents per line of code.
I tried tracking down where those numbers came from and the sources were a bit sketchy. Can anybody who has used Gas Town confirm those numbers, or report their personal numbers?
Using regular Claude code I can generate 4k lines an hour. Using some bash I can generate 4k lines of code per second.
Lines of code per hour is a bad metric.
Can it solve a problem using production quality code that doesn’t take four times as long to review? That sounds like something I would pay $100 for.
I think the point is that we are given no real idea at all, not even some ballpark figures, about how much actual money actually needs to be spent in order to run Gas Town. The original article had some handwavy stuff about how it cost An Awful Lot, but no actual numbers.
Cost per line of code is not an amazing metric, but at least it's an attempt to come up with a figure.
(I would also be interested to find out how much it costs to run...)
I hear what you’re saying, and I agree it would be nice to know, but I’ve also firmly bucketed this as “if you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it”.
Well, yes ideally we would eventually also have metrics about error rates and reject rates. Like ideally at some point someone could do a study of "for every 100 PRs Gas Town generates, how many are accepted after code review and how many are rejected" or "for every 100 lines of code Gas Town generates, how many coding errors are detected by human reviewers".
Unfortunately I think things are moving so fast that by the time such a study was done, we would already be on to newer models and newer versions of gas town.
I really need to huff more chemicals to keep up with the state of this insane type of engineering
i've experimented quite a lot with multi agent setups and orchestrations.
In the end, it didn't feel worth it mostly because of high token overhead (inter agent communications, agents re reading same code, etc...) and synchronization / cooperation issues (who should do what).
What actually works for me and provides good results: multi step workflows with clearly defined steps and strong guidance for the agent.
I don't know if Gastown will work out. But it is quite a bold take. I am interested to see how it plays out. I suspect they will eventually roll back some of the stringent "no code reading" approach in favor of observability as the community grows.
Also I chuckled at the AI-generated "The Overseer is Alnays Right | Vacation Approved" poster in the background of the split image where the mayor is reading so you can supervise. This has strong Boondocks Catcher Freeman vibes. I want to hear the polecats/badgers' version.
> I’ve been saying since last year that by the end of 2026, people will be mostly programming by talking to a face. There’s absolutely NO reason to type with the Mayor. You should be able to chat with them like a person. You’ll have a cartoon fox there onscreen, in costume, building and managing your production software, and showing you pretty status updates whenever you ask for one. This is the end state for IDEs.
This is a desirable end state for highly social but perhaps slightly sociopathic extroverts who want to spend all day talking even though they aren't talking to a person.
For anyone else, it's hard to imagine considering that a desirable way to spend eight hours a day.
This sounds like PaulHoule wrote it.
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Eh there's also introverts like me that find typing too slow and having a conversation with a computer is my ideal interaction :)
>This is a desirable end state for [a category of people] who want to spend all day talking even though they aren't talking to a person.
When I am not in actual meetings, I do already spend all day talking to anthropomorphized facets of my personality that represent software architecture, security paranoia, operational practicality, user experience, etc. Often not by speaking aloud, but it's a conversation nonetheless.
So yes, this sounds absolutely grand.
EDIT: But I don't think it should be forced on everyone! Having the option to use the tools that work best for you should be the goal.
Beads is needlessly overengineered. Puts me off from checking Gas Town.
Does anyone has any tips for starting with Gastown? I am comfortable with couple of agents running, but not yet comfortable with what Gastown offers.
Set a budget. Fund an openrouter account with the max you can stomach spending on this test and give it a shot.
At least, that’s what I would do, if I had any interest in testing out gastown with my own money. If my employer wants to pay for the testing, that’s another question entirely.
I mean not how to do it, it's not that hard, but how to be productive with it.
How does this compare to G-Stack?
TBH this post still reads like a clown show.
Someone said to treat it like a piece of performance art and that’s the funniest thing I have ever heard.
For one it’s a great way to dismiss any sort of criticism, and makes the positive comments claiming to gave built great stuff with it even funnier.
Read some of his earlier stuff. He’s a very informal writer, but he’s a damn good one with good ideas.
No. He used to be good with ideas. Now he's drinking too much of his own poison. His blog posts are bloviated monstrosities incapable of coherently describing the very trivial ideas contained in them.
> His blog posts are bloviated monstrosities incapable of coherently describing the very trivial ideas contained in them.
That's not true. He coherently and clearly described this crypto pump and dump nonsense he was pushing for a while https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-...
Ha, true!
I somehow forgot about this post.
I don't know, I understood it just fine? Might be a personal problem on your part.
Please point me to any place in my text where I said I didn't understand his very trivial ideas?
Yeah but the clown show is now marked 1.0 for release.
I cannot really get behind Gas Town or any other “agent swarm” setup. They always seem to waste an incredible amount of tokens on passing the buck around as half-finished specs, and even with a healthy amount of tokens pre-allocated they burn money faster than setting my wallet on fire…
I can't believe people give this any air time at all. If it was just some rando producing slop people wouldn't give it the time of day.
I think we need to take a hard line with AI stuff like this, and put the onus on the creator to prove these ideas have merit.
I feel Gastown is an attempt at answering: what if i push the multi-agent paradigm to its chaotic end?
But I think the point that Yegge doesn't address and that I had to discover for myself is: getting many agents working in parallel doing different things -- while cool and exciting (in an anthromorphic way) -- might not actually be solving the right problem. The bottleneck in development isn't workflow orchestration (what Gastown does) -- it's actually problem decomposition.
And Beads doesn't actually handle the decomposed problem well. I thought it did. But all it is is a task-graph system. Each bead is task, and agents can just pick up tasks to work on. That looks a lot like an SDE picking up a JIRA ticket right? But the problem is embedding just enough context in the task that the agent can do it right. But often it doesn't, so the agent has to guess missing context. And it often produces plausible code that is wrong.
Devolving a goal into the smaller slices is really where a lot of difficulty lies. You might say, oh, "I can just tell Claude to write Epics/Stories/Tasks, and it'll figure it out". Right? But without something grounding it like a spec, Claude doesn't do a good job. It won't know exactly how much context to provide to each independent agent.
What I have found useful is spec-driven development, especially of the opinionated variety that Kiro IDE offers. Kiro IDE is a middling Cursor, but an excellent spec generator -- in fact one of the best. It generates 3 specs at 3 levels of abstraction. It generates a Requirements doc in EARS/INCOSE (used at Rolls Royce and Boeing for reducing spec ambiguity), and then generate a Design doc (commonly done at FAANG), and... then generates a Task list, which cross-references the sections of the requirements/design.
This kind of spec hugely limits the degrees of freedom. The Requirements part of the spec actually captures intent, which is key. The Design part mocks interfaces, embeds glossaries, and also embeds PBTs (property-based tests using Hypothesis -- maybe eventually Hegel?) as gating mechanisms to check invariants. The Task list is what Beads is supposed to do -- but Beads can't do a good job because it doesn't have the other two specs.
I've deployed 4 products now using Kiro spec-driven dev (+ Simon Willison's tip "do red/green tdd") and they're running in prod and so far so good. They're pressure-tested using real data.
Spec-driven development isn't perfect but I feel its aim is the correct one -- to capture intentions, to reduce the degrees of freedom, and to constrain agents toward correctness. I tried using Claude Code's /plan mode but it's nowhere as rigorous, and there's still spec drift in the generated code. It doesn't pin down the problem sufficiently.
Gastown/Beads are solutions for workflow orchestration problem (which is exciting for tech bros), but at its core, it's not the most important problem. Problem decomposition is.
Otherwise you're just solving the wrong problem, fast.
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Please don't post personal attacks to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Thoughtful critique is of course fine but there's no need to be personal, and it should be something we can learn from.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Does the apparent rugpull on the $GAS meme coin[0] qualify?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge#Vibe_coding_and_cr...
Getting sucked into a crypto scam and then deciding to get out, despite the death threats(!)[1] is not a rug pull.
To be clear, the BAGS scam coin he got sucked into is a extractive zero-sum game where someone else creates a coin named after him, offers him trading commission to talk about it and then makes money off the hype.
He did the correct thing by leaving.
(I worked for a bit at a Web3 place. Went in with an open mind and now have opinions)
[1] https://x.com/Steve_Yegge/status/2043127887059210470
> someone else creates a coin named after him, offers him trading commission to talk about it and then makes money off the hype
And we are supposed to believe that someone deep in tech, in 2026, did not know this was going to be the end goal? Was $GAS supposed to be a crypto to help fund poor farmers in Burundi or something ? How else is the meme coin #16352813 supposed to end? That’s the entire point of meme coins.
Would love to also « get sucked » into making 300k$.
> Would love to also « get sucked » into making 300k$.
Exactly.
It seems harmless - "look, we have this token, it is being traded anyway, do you want to get some of the emissions?"
Who wouldn't say "yes" to that free money.
But it's not clear at all how corrupting the crypto scam is, and how subtly the corruption seeps into what you do. It starts by "oh can you just tweet out about this" and you are "sure - it's just a tweet" and slowly grows.
Steve Yegg deserves credit for walking away from it.
yeah its kind of sad, because people have to then re-evaluate others they heard about who they also didn't believe the apologies of at the time
like the Hawk Tuah girl, or the Enron relaunch long form comedy routine that wound up with a short lived crypto token, and pretty much anyone with 15 minutes of fame or celebrities that drop a contract address
for the most part, they themselves actually are the victims of a roving band of deployers running the crypto launch convincing them they're part of something, and of course, the consumers have the choice of never getting involved
but the deployers are the ones that should face some form of accountability, or at least the public eye
To me, no, not quite. I'll give him one free pass. More like "I'll coast on this pulled rug to see what happens" than that he did the rug pull. Not a very wise thing to do, but not malicious either.
The description on Wikipedia looks like somebody else created a memecoin in his honor, sent him the profits, and he accepted them? And the only people harmed were people who invest in random memecoins? I don't understand the problem.
I'm a long-time Steve Yegge fan but a major Gas Town hater (now Gas City too, I guess). It's doubling down on all the wrong metaphors.
I also simply detest how Gas Town is modeled fundamentally on an extractive and destructive metaphor, the 19th century factory. I want to live in a verdant software garden, not a dystopian industrialist hellscape.
In my view the StrongDM guys are on the right long-term path.
Steve Yegge, quite simply, has jumped the shark. He’s gone meta. The line between genius and utter lunacy is very thin.
>> I also simply detest how Gas Town is modeled fundamentally on an extractive and destructive metaphor, the 19th century factory.
I actually think the naming is apt because we are on the starting stages of a second Industrial Revolution.
Ha! https://github.com/gastownhall/gastown/issues/3649
downvoters get rekt
Does this support OpenAI-compatible APIs? Or is it only clowncode, codex and copilot? Love to try it but without OpenAI-compatible APIs it is junk.