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.
I really want to host a vibe coding competition and see what can actually be made with these systems. Like if we’re doing insane token spends, it better be in service of creating amazing stuff. Can we make an entirely new programming language? Can we make an OS?
That would be awesome to see! If there was some prize pool like $5,000 to build an operating system through vibe coding tools only and then people could stream themselves on twitch and you could have "sorts desk" type commentators who are collating all that together. I'd watch that and donate a hundred bucks.
Possible, yes. Easier? I tried to search for YouTube videos of people doing amazing things at blazing speed using Gas Town about a month ago, and couldn't find any. I for sure didn't want to spend hours reading and learning something that I don't know if it even works?
Does anyone have like, projects built using it? I couldn't find "look at the output" types of videos or articles or repos, only "look at the input" types of posts about it.
In all honesty, if you scoped this well, one of the big players in the LLM space could definitely host a big marketing event on this spin. Get together a bunch of well known industry folks, have them vibe code a working <thing> in a given time constraint, presentations and prizes, lots of marketing.
I am designing one, aimed at Claude Code and other AI Coding Agents, and getting the first version lex/parser/compiler was an afternoon project. It was initially a TypeScript toolchain generating TypeScript code.
I keep adding things here and there, a couple hours everyday. Then after about a week I decided to switch the toolchain from TypeScript to Rust, how much work? A 5 minute planning session and a ~20 minutes implementation phase.
With LLM-based tools that inherently rely so much on the semantics of language, I wonder if there will be differences in code generated for the "wanted board" in the "Wasteland", compared to the "task list" in the "public square" or the "wish list" in the "Utopia".
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.
"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."
It's interesting progression from Gas Town, but it seems like the bottleneck is still translating ideas into actionable input/output frameworks for various agentic tasks.
Also there's the issue of how to identify systems-interface problems and posting those tasks for completion as well. No guarantee that a totally federated system will not solve interfacial issues faster than they generate them without feedback and oversight.
Yesterday I wanted to change a white background to transparent on some clip art. I’m still learning Affinity so asked Google Gemini Nano Banana PRO 2. The output looked ok at first but the grey squares were a little off. They didn’t make a perfect grid. I opened it in mspaint and was able to erase the grey squares. It didn’t change the white background to transparent, it just drew an array of grey squares, but only good enough for a first glance. I have no idea how these AI tools can make anything of use if left to their own devices.
What's the incentive for anyone to participate in this? It seems wildly expensive (in tokens), high mental overhead to understand, high hardware cost. So what's the upside?
Is it for people with too much money and time on their hands to flex on Github?
I could at least understand the pitch if there was a crypto scam attached, or if folks were getting paid somehow (which might be an interesting social/AI experiment). But that doesn't seem to be the case.
> 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.
This is a classic example of a 'Solution in Search of a Metaphor.'
Strip away the 5,000 words of Fury Road fan fiction and you’re left with a multi-agent wrapper for Claude Code that effectively automates the generation of technical debt. It feels like Yegge is trying to brand 'shoveling tokens into a furnace' as a new paradigm, but the cognitive overhead of learning his proprietary 'lore' just to manage a tmux session of LLMs is a massive net loss in productivity.
We don't need a Wasteland; we need tools that actually improve the signal-to-noise ratio, not industrial-scale noise generators.
I think this is part of the point, perhaps? I get strong Urbit vibes from the Gastown fanfic. Take a relatively simple concept, but invent an entirely new vocabulary to describe it. It satisfies the creator's ego, and acts as a filter for non-believers. People need to buy in to the creator's vision and commit to learning the lingo in order to engage. People who don't get dismissed as lacking the capacity to understand. In other words, cult behavior.
Waste… I can’t stop thinking about the waste of human talent and potential. The waste of resources to run AI data centers. The waste of the now old school CS ethos. Yea, wasteland checks out.
AI got to him awhile ago, I'm afraid. Been telling stories about these gastowns, zero code review and thousands of lines of code and thousands of dollars in burned tokens since last year.
dolt is cool until you hit merge conflicts, need non-simple migrations, or you have a process that ETLs data before putting it in dolt in bulk (huge changesets because one column changes in every row)
separate company, not aware of any association, dolt has been around for a while
Reads like a scam. Obfuscatory language, outsized claims on future impact, excited opportunity advertisement, first-mover advantage, "no time for the rulebook, it's an inch thick!".
Hilarious too that he uses the word "wasteland" for something that's supposedly good. Perhaps it is a double coding where all of us normies mock it but the FOMO-blinded have their own private reading and say the rest of us are totally wrong.
Reminds me of those 419 emails where the grammar is bad, the story makes no sense, but hey there really are people who expect $10 million to fall out of the sky because they already had $10 million fall out of the sky on them.
I find it amusing that the crypto crowd has yet to recognize their echo chamber and decided to bring it with them during their big pivot to ai. Their culture is offputting
Every Yegge post about AI reads like a Music Man style con job, but he’s got Silicon Valley startup founders salivating and pushing his book to their employees.
People should stop giving Steve Yegge as much attention as they do.
It's slop on top of slop on top of slop. It's not even quality slop. Apart from bloviated self-aggrandising blog posts, the ideas are trivial, and the execution is beyond horrendous.
Look beyond the ChatGPT-generated terminology to see the supervisors, loops and worker processes of Gas Town. Now it's a freelance board with AI agents as freelancers. But sure, polecats, mayors, stamps and character sheets. Whatever floats your upcoming crypto rug pull [1].
This is what he writes: "build stuff really, really fast. So fast that your biggest problem will be ideas." We've yet to see ideas built using the slopcoded monstrosities.
It's saddening to see folks here on HN direct so much contempt towards this. I have no intention of messing with Gas Town or Wasteland, but I think it's cool that folks like Steve with lots of money and time are using it to build stuff they find cool and interesting. I doubt these projects are the future of AI agent orchestration, but I do think they're probably going to help us collectively learn better how to work with AI.
And if they don't, so what? Who cares? Why be angry at Steve for playing around with a fun hobby project that goes nowhere?
Regardless of whether this particular project goes anywhere, it's at least very interesting that Yegge has discovered a way to make multi-agent setups work better. Giving them discrete personas ("you are a senior database engineer with 30 years of experience") and narrower scopes makes them much more effective. This was surprising to me but makes a lot of sense in retrospect.
I see a lot of folks lamenting how Yegge has ignited a fire under leadership for egoless, factory worker style engineers. I don't think many would care much otherwise, but his post here is lamenting AI is not enough of a factory worker yet. On a site mostly populated by folks who put most of their lives into becoming skilled professionals, hearing "we think your work should be the kind of work we send to the cheapest, least-developed places on earth" like factory work is disheartening. Of course, it mostly seems like Yegge is here to make money off meme coins and selling Dolt plus his vibe-authored book, so why would anyone take this seriously?
I mean, he can't explain what he's building except pickaxes to make more pickaxes, so it's a bit suspicious. It's just incredible how much impact he has had with this little hustle, given his products are basically turtles all the way down.
> Why be angry at Steve for playing around with a fun hobby project that goes nowhere?
People dislike scam artists, hype artists and bullshitters. Especially when said artists had something actually useful to contribute once upon a time. E.g. Yegge's Platform Rant [1] is still required reading IMO.
Now he's uncritically and unapologetically pushes extremely low quality level AI slop while first trying to prop up Amp, then trying to sell a book, then trying to sell a crypto scam, now trying to sell a vibe-coded database. All the while proclaiming his projects have the basest of basic ideas but somehow need hundreds of thousands of lines of AI-generated low quality slop code to barely function.
The contempt here is the same as for idiots who uncritically run clawdbot and other AI bullshitters and grifters.
Compare this to @simonw who constantly evaluates coding agents, explains what he does in a coherent clear language that doesn't use ChatGPT to invent new inane terms for existing things, and stands behind his work and motivations: https://simonwillison.net
There are two bottlenecks in software.
First is understanding what to build.
Second is getting the details right.
The best software is both the right software, and high quality. It’s bloody hard to do!
So, we do requirements gathering, and try to get the details right (TDD, continuous delivery etc).. it’s surprising to see Gas Town do none of this and optimistically hope agents will converge on good software by just throwing tokens at a wall and hoping it sticks.
So anyway, that’s what they’re ignoring. What are they actually doing???
It’s all for themselves.
Gas Town’s “product” is the warm fuzzies it gives people with money to burn, warm fuzzy feelings of being “at the frontier”. It’s a luxury product for nerds, and the only ones making money or selling anything are the big labs. There’s zero output or benefit to society because that’s simply not the point.
I really want to host a vibe coding competition and see what can actually be made with these systems. Like if we’re doing insane token spends, it better be in service of creating amazing stuff. Can we make an entirely new programming language? Can we make an OS?
That would be awesome to see! If there was some prize pool like $5,000 to build an operating system through vibe coding tools only and then people could stream themselves on twitch and you could have "sorts desk" type commentators who are collating all that together. I'd watch that and donate a hundred bucks.
Possible, yes. Easier? I tried to search for YouTube videos of people doing amazing things at blazing speed using Gas Town about a month ago, and couldn't find any. I for sure didn't want to spend hours reading and learning something that I don't know if it even works?
Does anyone have like, projects built using it? I couldn't find "look at the output" types of videos or articles or repos, only "look at the input" types of posts about it.
> 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".)
I would much prefer vibe-coding to be used at the highest layers, not the substrate that we all depend on.
Crossing my fingers for an open source Chromium browser on Android with extensions enabled.
This sounds like a great idea, but I think two questions need to be asked for this to make sense:
I wish we could get to UBI so we don't have to ask those questions.In all honesty, if you scoped this well, one of the big players in the LLM space could definitely host a big marketing event on this spin. Get together a bunch of well known industry folks, have them vibe code a working <thing> in a given time constraint, presentations and prizes, lots of marketing.
A lot of it seems to be porting open source projects to rust for other open source projects to consume.
>Can we make an entirely new programming language?
This is trivial in a few hours with Claude Code
I am designing one, aimed at Claude Code and other AI Coding Agents, and getting the first version lex/parser/compiler was an afternoon project. It was initially a TypeScript toolchain generating TypeScript code.
I keep adding things here and there, a couple hours everyday. Then after about a week I decided to switch the toolchain from TypeScript to Rust, how much work? A 5 minute planning session and a ~20 minutes implementation phase.
Trivial stuff indeed.
Feels like a missed opportunity to not use Blockchain for the reputational ledger. A throwback reference to quaint, olden times.
I was thinking the same thing, should have put all the buzzwords together in one soup.
With LLM-based tools that inherently rely so much on the semantics of language, I wonder if there will be differences in code generated for the "wanted board" in the "Wasteland", compared to the "task list" in the "public square" or the "wish list" in the "Utopia".
Let's see...
You can be part of the new reputation economy, IF you can afford Multiple Claude Max subscriptions and use all your tokens for it.
Kind of like "getting good" at a collectible card game. It's more weighted toward whether you have money (and are willing to spend it) than anything else.
"DoIt" looks like "Dolt" in all too many fonts.
I legitametly thought it was Dolt until you pointed it out
The database actually is named "Dolt." It's their own take on "git."
https://www.dolthub.com/
nit, 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
Yeah, I meant the name is a play on 'git'.
How so? They only share a final letter in common
https://docs.dolthub.com/other/faq#why-is-it-called-dolt-are...
hmm, perhaps this is the underpinnings of why I stopped using dolt (trying to be too clever makes things harder in the long run)
It is DOLT, you were right.
https://www.historyofthebutton.com/ok-button-origins/
Wait it’s not Dolt? I assumed it was named in the same vein as “Git” when I read it
I literally thought it was "Dolt" until I read your comment.
lol it's DOLT, not DoIt.
Yegge's Medium uses a serif font so you can tell, but in many faces you can't.
(We still get this comment constantly and it's very unfortunate)
Gas Town Wasteland is an elaborate growth hack for DoltDB
I don't claim I am a good developer, but I seriously doubt any project which can't be explained with couple of sentences at most.
He's just verbose. "We added another layer of agentic orchestration on top of our existing layers, also now it's distributed."
"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."
Remember when they did that dopamine abstinence movement?
Who? I am really interested, can you provide more info?
It was thing among SV people around the crypto era
https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2019/nov/19/do...
Is this cyberpsychosis?
It's interesting progression from Gas Town, but it seems like the bottleneck is still translating ideas into actionable input/output frameworks for various agentic tasks.
Also there's the issue of how to identify systems-interface problems and posting those tasks for completion as well. No guarantee that a totally federated system will not solve interfacial issues faster than they generate them without feedback and oversight.
This has the feel of onanism, sorry.
Which feels nice for the one doing it!
The name, at least, is fitting.
ἀποθανεῖν θέλω
I'm still choosing to believe this is all a joke.
Yesterday I wanted to change a white background to transparent on some clip art. I’m still learning Affinity so asked Google Gemini Nano Banana PRO 2. The output looked ok at first but the grey squares were a little off. They didn’t make a perfect grid. I opened it in mspaint and was able to erase the grey squares. It didn’t change the white background to transparent, it just drew an array of grey squares, but only good enough for a first glance. I have no idea how these AI tools can make anything of use if left to their own devices.
I would've asked Claude Code to write a program to do it
You're cherry picking.
This show has really lost the plot.
He can race with Stephen Wolfram: Is the universe really automata in disguise or Gas Towns? A couple "abstractions" up and he'll be there.
What's the incentive for anyone to participate in this? It seems wildly expensive (in tokens), high mental overhead to understand, high hardware cost. So what's the upside?
Is it for people with too much money and time on their hands to flex on Github?
I could at least understand the pitch if there was a crypto scam attached, or if folks were getting paid somehow (which might be an interesting social/AI experiment). But that doesn't seem to be the case.
What's the incentive for people to contribute to an open source project?
This just in, society is cooked guys! I know this sounds incredible to believe, but we don't need society anymore.
> 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.
This is a classic example of a 'Solution in Search of a Metaphor.' Strip away the 5,000 words of Fury Road fan fiction and you’re left with a multi-agent wrapper for Claude Code that effectively automates the generation of technical debt. It feels like Yegge is trying to brand 'shoveling tokens into a furnace' as a new paradigm, but the cognitive overhead of learning his proprietary 'lore' just to manage a tmux session of LLMs is a massive net loss in productivity. We don't need a Wasteland; we need tools that actually improve the signal-to-noise ratio, not industrial-scale noise generators.
I think this is part of the point, perhaps? I get strong Urbit vibes from the Gastown fanfic. Take a relatively simple concept, but invent an entirely new vocabulary to describe it. It satisfies the creator's ego, and acts as a filter for non-believers. People need to buy in to the creator's vision and commit to learning the lingo in order to engage. People who don't get dismissed as lacking the capacity to understand. In other words, cult behavior.
Can we fast-forward to the alien spaceships and kool-aid part?
> 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?
I think so?
I've not seen anyone take Gas Town seriously or even semi-seriously in the way people take Openclaw semi-seriously.
Gas Town certainly seems like a concept for performance art. The original blog post read like it, and so does this.
It reminds me of the time the band KLF burned £1 million in cash as a performance piece. They obviously regretted it afterwards.
Waste… I can’t stop thinking about the waste of human talent and potential. The waste of resources to run AI data centers. The waste of the now old school CS ethos. Yea, wasteland checks out.
The future is wastemaxxing
Considering how disdainful our descendants may once look upon this time, we may as well hope it won't be remembered.
Or worse, public masterbation.
But using the milking machines from A Boy and His Dog.
AI got to Yegge,too. What the hell is "Gas Town" and why should I watch AI generated furry stuff?
All I can take from this is that you must spend more tokens.
AI got to him awhile ago, I'm afraid. Been telling stories about these gastowns, zero code review and thousands of lines of code and thousands of dollars in burned tokens since last year.
It's elegant because it's simple https://youtu.be/HHVPutfveVs
kinda reads like an advertisement for dolt?
Dolt is definitely the most interesting thing mentioned to me.
dolt is cool until you hit merge conflicts, need non-simple migrations, or you have a process that ETLs data before putting it in dolt in bulk (huge changesets because one column changes in every row)
separate company, not aware of any association, dolt has been around for a while
I don't understand what this is about. What's a wasteland? What's a gas town?
Is this Ethereum related?
Help?
Reads like a scam. Obfuscatory language, outsized claims on future impact, excited opportunity advertisement, first-mover advantage, "no time for the rulebook, it's an inch thick!".
I'm good, thanks.
Hilarious too that he uses the word "wasteland" for something that's supposedly good. Perhaps it is a double coding where all of us normies mock it but the FOMO-blinded have their own private reading and say the rest of us are totally wrong.
Reminds me of those 419 emails where the grammar is bad, the story makes no sense, but hey there really are people who expect $10 million to fall out of the sky because they already had $10 million fall out of the sky on them.
I find it amusing that the crypto crowd has yet to recognize their echo chamber and decided to bring it with them during their big pivot to ai. Their culture is offputting
Every Yegge post about AI reads like a Music Man style con job, but he’s got Silicon Valley startup founders salivating and pushing his book to their employees.
People should stop giving Steve Yegge as much attention as they do.
It's slop on top of slop on top of slop. It's not even quality slop. Apart from bloviated self-aggrandising blog posts, the ideas are trivial, and the execution is beyond horrendous.
Look beyond the ChatGPT-generated terminology to see the supervisors, loops and worker processes of Gas Town. Now it's a freelance board with AI agents as freelancers. But sure, polecats, mayors, stamps and character sheets. Whatever floats your upcoming crypto rug pull [1].
This is what he writes: "build stuff really, really fast. So fast that your biggest problem will be ideas." We've yet to see ideas built using the slopcoded monstrosities.
[1] https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vib...
I 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/
It's saddening to see folks here on HN direct so much contempt towards this. I have no intention of messing with Gas Town or Wasteland, but I think it's cool that folks like Steve with lots of money and time are using it to build stuff they find cool and interesting. I doubt these projects are the future of AI agent orchestration, but I do think they're probably going to help us collectively learn better how to work with AI.
And if they don't, so what? Who cares? Why be angry at Steve for playing around with a fun hobby project that goes nowhere?
If you can point to single product he has made through his "vibe-coding" that isn't for "vibe-coding," I think they would all relent.
Regardless of whether this particular project goes anywhere, it's at least very interesting that Yegge has discovered a way to make multi-agent setups work better. Giving them discrete personas ("you are a senior database engineer with 30 years of experience") and narrower scopes makes them much more effective. This was surprising to me but makes a lot of sense in retrospect.
I see a lot of folks lamenting how Yegge has ignited a fire under leadership for egoless, factory worker style engineers. I don't think many would care much otherwise, but his post here is lamenting AI is not enough of a factory worker yet. On a site mostly populated by folks who put most of their lives into becoming skilled professionals, hearing "we think your work should be the kind of work we send to the cheapest, least-developed places on earth" like factory work is disheartening. Of course, it mostly seems like Yegge is here to make money off meme coins and selling Dolt plus his vibe-authored book, so why would anyone take this seriously?
I mean, he can't explain what he's building except pickaxes to make more pickaxes, so it's a bit suspicious. It's just incredible how much impact he has had with this little hustle, given his products are basically turtles all the way down.
> Why be angry at Steve for playing around with a fun hobby project that goes nowhere?
People dislike scam artists, hype artists and bullshitters. Especially when said artists had something actually useful to contribute once upon a time. E.g. Yegge's Platform Rant [1] is still required reading IMO.
Now he's uncritically and unapologetically pushes extremely low quality level AI slop while first trying to prop up Amp, then trying to sell a book, then trying to sell a crypto scam, now trying to sell a vibe-coded database. All the while proclaiming his projects have the basest of basic ideas but somehow need hundreds of thousands of lines of AI-generated low quality slop code to barely function.
The contempt here is the same as for idiots who uncritically run clawdbot and other AI bullshitters and grifters.
Compare this to @simonw who constantly evaluates coding agents, explains what he does in a coherent clear language that doesn't use ChatGPT to invent new inane terms for existing things, and stands behind his work and motivations: https://simonwillison.net
[1] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611