[HN Gopher] Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0
___________________________________________________________________
Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0
Author : martythemaniak
Score : 58 points
Date : 2026-04-14 19:18 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (steve-yegge.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (steve-yegge.medium.com)
| avaer wrote:
| TBH this post still reads like a clown show.
| righthand wrote:
| Yeah but the clown show is now marked 1.0 for release.
| moomin wrote:
| Read some of his earlier stuff. He's a very informal writer,
| but he's a damn good one with good ideas.
| troupo wrote:
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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.
| javawizard wrote:
| 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?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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
| maleldil wrote:
| Who closes the gate? Is it Claude itself after it runs the
| verification? Who makes sure the verification did in fact
| run?
| skybrian wrote:
| 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?
| mmastrac wrote:
| 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.
| rbtprograms wrote:
| 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.
| blahblaher wrote:
| 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.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| 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.
| panzagl wrote:
| I think the main thing he's produced using Gas Town is Gas
| Town itself.
| root_axis wrote:
| > _you can always fire it up yourself and see what its all
| about_
|
| I imagine it doesn't run very cheaply.
| drekipus wrote:
| > _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?
| dist-epoch wrote:
| > 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
| Zafira wrote:
| 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.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Does this mean you would avoid an article on PostgreSQL if
| it's from a company selling Postgres products or
| consultation?
| Leszek wrote:
| It means they'd avoid an article on the benefits of
| smoking if it's posted by a company selling cigarettes.
| mtlynch wrote:
| This seems to be an AI-generated post where the "author"
| never reveals building any successful product or even
| tangible project with Gas Town.
| joezydeco wrote:
| It's like Web 4.0 zombo.com
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| 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.
| tom_ wrote:
| I don't use LLMs and I never use agentic coding. And I too
| am interested in an answer to this question.
| tcoff91 wrote:
| 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?
| torginus wrote:
| 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?
| _pdp_ wrote:
| 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.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| 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
| RugnirViking wrote:
| 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
| en-tro-py wrote:
| 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...
| solomatov wrote:
| 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.
| peddling-brink wrote:
| 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.
| solomatov wrote:
| I mean not how to do it, it's not that hard, but how to be
| productive with it.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| > 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.
| siva7 wrote:
| 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?
| throwup238 wrote:
| Same institution I'd send Steve today.
|
| The sanatorium from American Horror Story Asylum comes to
| mind.
|
| _Dominique, nique, nique..._
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| 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?
| throwup238 wrote:
| 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| 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.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| We're supposed to be engineers. Criticising a concept
| based on conjecture and insult is unbecoming of our
| culture.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| 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.
| Avshalom wrote:
| "every 5th article is about no-code-solutions that sometimes
| work" might be unexpected but it's hardly the stuff of
| institutionalization.
| avaer wrote:
| 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| cma wrote:
| > The important audit at my company is conducted by [Trump's
| second term] FDA.
|
| Could work
| ncruces wrote:
| The original Beads, it seems, used my CGO-free SQLite driver.
|
| Seems like I'm back to obscurity.
|
| :)
| a_t48 wrote:
| You got relegated to a stack of dirty stacked up crates,
| according to the genAI article images.
| pianopatrick wrote:
| 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?
| peddling-brink wrote:
| 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.
| tom_ wrote:
| 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...)
| pianopatrick wrote:
| 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.
| throw1234567891 wrote:
| 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.
| vessenes wrote:
| 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.
| cdrnsf wrote:
| An apt name for something doing it's part to spike energy
| consumption and accelerate the climate crisis.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| 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.
| cdrnsf wrote:
| 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| 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.
| cdrnsf wrote:
| 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).
| sailingparrot wrote:
| 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 ...
| rspeele wrote:
| > 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.
| cachius wrote:
| Reminds me of Urbit the completely exotic computer network
| actionfromafar wrote:
| That's fully veered into cult territory.
| winstonp wrote:
| Yegge is a snake oil salesman
| dang wrote:
| 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
| karmakaze wrote:
| Does the apparent rugpull on the $GAS meme coin[0] qualify?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge#Vibe_coding_and
| _cr...
| actionfromafar wrote:
| 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.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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.
| dbbk wrote:
| 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.
| CharlesW wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| _> 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.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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.
| pron wrote:
| 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.
|
| * 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 that put things in a new light,
| and 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. So even
| if it is a matter of context, it is not something that can be
| solved with better context _management_.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2026-04-14 23:00 UTC)