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Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns
- throwup238 7mo ago> The Wasteland was designed for federating work, but its metamorphosis into an RPG seems unstoppable at this point. This is all just performance art at this point, right?
- jackyinger 7mo agoWaste… I can’t stop thinking about the waste of human talent and potential. The waste of resources to run AI data centers. The waste of the now old school CS ethos. Yea, wasteland checks out.
- zingababba 7mo agoThe future is wastemaxxing
- RGamma 7mo agoConsidering how disdainful our descendants may once look upon this time, we may as well hope it won't be remembered.
- xnorswap 7mo agoI think so? I've not seen anyone take Gas Town seriously or even semi-seriously in the way people take Openclaw semi-seriously. Gas Town certainly seems like a concept for performance art. The original blog post read like it, and so does this.
- andrew_lettuce 7mo agoOr worse, public masterbation.
- righthand 7mo agoBut using the milking machines from A Boy and His Dog.
- benwad 7mo agoIt reminds me of the time the band KLF burned £1 million in cash as a performance piece. They obviously regretted it afterwards.
- conartist6 7mo agoThis just in, society is cooked guys! I know this sounds incredible to believe, but we don't need society anymore.
- dgathercole 7mo agoThe name, at least, is fitting.
- qsort 7mo agoἀποθανεῖν θέλω
- hardwaregeek 7mo agoI really want to host a vibe coding competition and see what can actually be made with these systems. Like if we’re doing insane token spends, it better be in service of creating amazing stuff. Can we make an entirely new programming language? Can we make an OS?
- rustyboy 7mo agoThat would be awesome to see! If there was some prize pool like $5,000 to build an operating system through vibe coding tools only and then people could stream themselves on twitch and you could have "sorts desk" type commentators who are collating all that together. I'd watch that and donate a hundred bucks.
- steveklabnik 7mo ago> Can we make an entirely new programming language? Can we make an OS? I have seen both of these already. I've done the former personally, and I've seen links to at least kernels for the latter. (I didn't do it via gastown, just regular old "use Claude".)
- hardwaregeek 7mo agoThat’d also be an interesting data point! What’s the upper limits of vibe coding? Can you vibe code rust? What about an entire programming language toolchain? How about an ecosystem? Can you make a parallel npm?
- karmakaze 7mo agoI would much prefer vibe-coding to be used at the highest layers, not the substrate that we all depend on.
- Sevii 7mo agoA lot of it seems to be porting open source projects to rust for other open source projects to consume.
- avaer 7mo agoThis sounds like a great idea, but I think two questions need to be asked for this to make sense: 1) Who is organizing/arbitrating? 2) Who is paying for the tokens? Is there some sort of funding or prize? I wish we could get to UBI so we don't have to ask those questions.
- condensedcrab 7mo agoIt's interesting progression from Gas Town, but it seems like the bottleneck is still translating ideas into actionable input/output frameworks for various agentic tasks. Also there's the issue of how to identify systems-interface problems and posting those tasks for completion as well. No guarantee that a totally federated system will not solve interfacial issues faster than they generate them without feedback and oversight.
- andrew_lettuce 7mo agoFeels like a missed opportunity to not use Blockchain for the reputational ledger. A throwback reference to quaint, olden times.
- plagiarist 7mo agoI was thinking the same thing, should have put all the buzzwords together in one soup.
- robotmaxtron 7mo agoThis show has really lost the plot.
- RGamma 7mo agoHe can race with Stephen Wolfram: Is the universe really automata in disguise or Gas Towns? A couple "abstractions" up and he'll be there.
- samothrace 7mo agoReads like a scam. Obfuscatory language, outsized claims on future impact, excited opportunity advertisement, first-mover advantage, "no time for the rulebook, it's an inch thick!". I'm good, thanks.
- PaulHoule 7mo agoHilarious too that he uses the word "wasteland" for something that's supposedly good. Perhaps it is a double coding where all of us normies mock it but the FOMO-blinded have their own private reading and say the rest of us are totally wrong. Reminds me of those 419 emails where the grammar is bad, the story makes no sense, but hey there really are people who expect $10 million to fall out of the sky because they already had $10 million fall out of the sky on them.
- verdverm 7mo agoI find it amusing that the crypto crowd has yet to recognize their echo chamber and decided to bring it with them during their big pivot to ai. Their culture is offputting
- troupo 7mo agoPeople should stop giving Steve Yegge as much attention as they do. It's slop on top of slop on top of slop. It's not even quality slop. Apart from bloviated self-aggrandising blog posts, the ideas are trivial, and the execution is beyond horrendous. Look beyond the ChatGPT-generated terminology to see the supervisors, loops and worker processes of Gas Town. Now it's a freelance board with AI agents as freelancers. But sure, polecats, mayors, stamps and character sheets. Whatever floats your upcoming crypto rug pull [1]. This is what he writes: "build stuff really, really fast. So fast that your biggest problem will be ideas." We've yet to see ideas built using the slopcoded monstrosities. [1] https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vibe-coding-goes-crypto-scam/ https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vib...
- verdverm 7mo agoI suspect ns;nt will be one of those HN stories that helped reframe things here for the better. It will stand the test of time ns;nt (No Skill; No Taste) https://blog.kinglycrow.com/no-skill-no-taste/ https://blog.kinglycrow.com/no-skill-no-taste/
- AstKaj 7mo agoAI got to Yegge,too. What the hell is "Gas Town" and why should I watch AI generated furry stuff? All I can take from this is that you must spend more tokens.
- Ronsenshi 7mo agoAI got to him awhile ago, I'm afraid. Been telling stories about these gastowns, zero code review and thousands of lines of code and thousands of dollars in burned tokens since last year.
- avaer 7mo agoWhat's the incentive for anyone to participate in this? It seems wildly expensive (in tokens), high mental overhead to understand, high hardware cost. So what's the upside? Is it for people with too much money and time on their hands to flex on Github? I could at least understand the pitch if there was a crypto scam attached, or if folks were getting paid somehow (which might be an interesting social/AI experiment). But that doesn't seem to be the case.
- zachmu 7mo agoWhat's the incentive for people to contribute to an open source project?
- rbtprograms 7mo agokinda reads like an advertisement for dolt?
- cestith 7mo agoDolt is definitely the most interesting thing mentioned to me.
- verdverm 7mo agodolt is cool until you hit merge conflicts, need non-simple migrations, or you have a process that ETLs data before putting it in dolt in bulk (huge changesets because one column changes in every row) separate company, not aware of any association, dolt has been around for a while
- corporat 7mo agoThis is a classic example of a 'Solution in Search of a Metaphor.' Strip away the 5,000 words of Fury Road fan fiction and you’re left with a multi-agent wrapper for Claude Code that effectively automates the generation of technical debt. It feels like Yegge is trying to brand 'shoveling tokens into a furnace' as a new paradigm, but the cognitive overhead of learning his proprietary 'lore' just to manage a tmux session of LLMs is a massive net loss in productivity. We don't need a Wasteland; we need tools that actually improve the signal-to-noise ratio, not industrial-scale noise generators.
- brendoelfrendo 7mo agoI think this is part of the point, perhaps? I get strong Urbit vibes from the Gastown fanfic. Take a relatively simple concept, but invent an entirely new vocabulary to describe it. It satisfies the creator's ego, and acts as a filter for non-believers. People need to buy in to the creator's vision and commit to learning the lingo in order to engage. People who don't get dismissed as lacking the capacity to understand. In other words, cult behavior.
- tadfisher 7mo agoCan we fast-forward to the alien spaceships and kool-aid part?
- DragonStrength 7mo agoEvery Yegge post about AI reads like a Music Man style con job, but he’s got Silicon Valley startup founders salivating and pushing his book to their employees.
- barrkel 7mo agoThis has the feel of onanism, sorry.
- drivebyhooting 7mo agoWhich feels nice for the one doing it!
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- pron 7mo agoIt's elegant because it's simple https://youtu.be/HHVPutfveVs https://youtu.be/HHVPutfveVs
- npilk 7mo agoWith LLM-based tools that inherently rely so much on the semantics of language, I wonder if there will be differences in code generated for the "wanted board" in the "Wasteland", compared to the "task list" in the "public square" or the "wish list" in the "Utopia".
- fc417fc802 7mo agoWould be interesting to see what the outcome would be of assigning an "angel" or a "devout brother" to work on TempleOS.
- egypturnash 7mo ago"DoIt" looks like "Dolt" in all too many fonts.
- rektomatic 7mo agoI legitametly thought it was Dolt until you pointed it out
- zachmu 7mo agoIt is DOLT, you were right.
- skybrian 7mo agoThe database actually is named "Dolt." It's their own take on "git." https://www.dolthub.com/ https://www.dolthub.com/
- verdverm 7mo agonit, Dolt is more a relational database with some git addons, i.e. it started from SQL to make it better, rather than starting from git and adding SQL
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- bambax 7mo ago> The Wasteland is a way to link thousands of Gas Towns together (...) to build stuff really, really fast. So fast that your biggest problem will be ideas. This reads like a speech from Pete Hegseth. "Let's do war! Hard! Let's build stuff! Stat!" Build what? Fight for what? "The hell if we know! Just get busy dropping bombs, or "stamps" or whatever! Faster!" In the end, all that's left is, indeed, a wasteland.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- alecbz 7mo agoI'm still choosing to believe this is all a joke.
- bloggie 7mo agoYesterday I wanted to change a white background to transparent on some clip art. I’m still learning Affinity so asked Google Gemini Nano Banana PRO 2. The output looked ok at first but the grey squares were a little off. They didn’t make a perfect grid. I opened it in mspaint and was able to erase the grey squares. It didn’t change the white background to transparent, it just drew an array of grey squares, but only good enough for a first glance. I have no idea how these AI tools can make anything of use if left to their own devices.
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- block_dagger 7mo agoYou're cherry picking.
- shepherdjerred 7mo agoI would've asked Claude Code to write a program to do it
- nkzd 7mo agoI don't claim I am a good developer, but I seriously doubt any project which can't be explained with couple of sentences at most.
- plagiarist 7mo agoHe's just verbose. "We added another layer of agentic orchestration on top of our existing layers, also now it's distributed."
- pocksuppet 7mo ago"We pay for 10000 AI bots and it makes awesome software, which is invisible and undetectable by anybody except me. It gives me a sense of pride and accomplishment."
- verdverm 7mo agoRemember when they did that dopamine abstinence movement?
- nkzd 7mo agoWho? I am really interested, can you provide more info?
- verdverm 7mo agoIt was thing among SV people around the crypto era https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2019/nov/19/dopamine-fasting-silicon-valley-avoid-stimulation https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2019/nov/19/do...
- RGamma 7mo agoIs this cyberpsychosis?
- juancn 7mo agoI don't understand what this is about. What's a wasteland? What's a gas town? Is this Ethereum related? Help?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- senordevnyc 7mo agoIt's saddening to see folks here on HN direct so much contempt towards this. I have no intention of messing with Gas Town or Wasteland, but I think it's cool that folks like Steve with lots of money and time are using it to build stuff they find cool and interesting. I doubt these projects are the future of AI agent orchestration, but I do think they're probably going to help us collectively learn better how to work with AI. And if they don't, so what? Who cares? Why be angry at Steve for playing around with a fun hobby project that goes nowhere?
- zachmu 7mo agoRegardless of whether this particular project goes anywhere, it's at least very interesting that Yegge has discovered a way to make multi-agent setups work better. Giving them discrete personas ("you are a senior database engineer with 30 years of experience") and narrower scopes makes them much more effective. This was surprising to me but makes a lot of sense in retrospect.
- ufmace 7mo agoThe part that always struck me as weird about this stuff is that all of these "agents" with their "personas" are the same baseline LLMs with the same training ultimately, just told to basically pretend they're different. How far can that really get you? I'm not actually a database engineer with 30 years of experience. If somebody demanded that I pretend to be one, I guess I'd give it a shot, but I would expect any actual employer would be able to tell that I don't have the level of knowledge and experience that you'd expect from somebody like that. If the base LLM actually has the knowledge of all of these specialties, why can't it just apply them all at once, instead of needing to be told to I guess pretend to be only one of them.
- thinkling 7mo agoAgreed, would really like to understand what this (setting the LLM up to assume a role to improve performance) is doing under the cover and why it works. Why aren't the labs training models to pick a mantra appropriate to the task and do this themselves? "Huh, a database question. I am going to pretend I'm a database expert with lots of experience. OK, here we go!"
- ozten 7mo agoGas Town Wasteland is an elaborate growth hack for DoltDB
- citrusx 7mo agoLet's see... You can be part of the new reputation economy, IF you can afford Multiple Claude Max subscriptions and use all your tokens for it. Kind of like "getting good" at a collectible card game. It's more weighted toward whether you have money (and are willing to spend it) than anything else.
- cadamsdotcom 7mo agoThere are two bottlenecks in software. First is understanding what to build. Second is getting the details right. The best software is both the right software, and high quality. It’s bloody hard to do! So, we do requirements gathering, and try to get the details right (TDD, continuous delivery etc).. it’s surprising to see Gas Town do none of this and optimistically hope agents will converge on good software by just throwing tokens at a wall and hoping it sticks. So anyway, that’s what they’re ignoring. What are they actually doing??? It’s all for themselves. Gas Town’s “product” is the warm fuzzies it gives people with money to burn, warm fuzzy feelings of being “at the frontier”. It’s a luxury product for nerds, and the only ones making money or selling anything are the big labs. There’s zero output or benefit to society because that’s simply not the point.
- mieubrisse 7mo agoI'm working on this! https://github.com/mieubrisse/agenc https://github.com/mieubrisse/agenc I think Gastown is truly special, but I wanted something more focused on learning as I think that's the real bottleneck. So I built AgenC to make it trivial to roll learnings back into your Claude.
- ebcode 7mo agoCan anyone tell me what Yegge is on, so I can try some? Is it just money/tokens?
- planckscnst 7mo agoI mostly use LLMs in a zero-touch way - I never actually edit code and I almost never read it. But I do still dive into the details by exploring it with targeted questions through the LLM. Sometimes I go through ridiculously long sessions to get the LLM to "see" the correct/optimal/simplest/etc solution itself. There are many times when it simply never gets there no matter how close I get the horse to the water. I recently did one of these sessions yesterday and it reinforced my impression that systems like gastown and pure Ralph loop style is just not ever going to have the quality I'm looking for, and it's going to cost a lot of money not to get there. I've honed a relatively decent flow that requires interaction from me for important parts (mostly) while making its own decisions at the not-important parts (mostly). This results in being able to send the agent off on an hours-long dev cycle and have relatively decent results after that need a few minor fixes. I think this is the best style for the current generation of AI