Stop it. Get some help.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0_8gPam4tM&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260122-steve-yegges-gas-town-vibe-coding-goes-crypto-scam - podcast
time: 9 min 49 sec
I too was and am horrified at Gas Town, but now I see multiple submissions to lobste.rs and HN not ridiculing it, but actually engaging, and reluctanly concludes that Yegge’s Still Got It.
Nah, it’s just one guy, and he is so angry about how he is being treated on Lobsters. First there was this satire post making fun of Gas Town. Then there was our one guy’s post and it’s not doing super-well. Finally, there’s this analysis of Gas Town’s structure which I shared specifically for the purpose of writing a comment explaining why Gas Town can’t possibly do what it’s supposed to do. My conclusion is sneer enough, I think:
When we strip away the LLMs, the underlying structure [of Gas Town] can be mapped to a standard process-supervision tree rather than some new LLM-invented object.
I think it’s worth pointing out that our guy is crashing out primarily because of this post about integrating with Bluesky, where he fails to talk down to a woman who is trying to use an open-source system as documented. You have to keep in mind that Lobsters is the Polite Garden Party and we have to constantly temper our words in order to be acceptable there. Our guy doesn’t have the constitution for that.
it’s the Polite Garden Party where the loud AI salesmen are welcome
that’s lobster’s brand now
I think it’s worth pointing out that our guy is crashing out primarily because of this post about integrating with Bluesky,
I’ve never bothered getting into ATproto arguments. They always have a faint air of fashwashing over them. Or it’s a bit like Urbit where only those in the know are welcome.
I find his posts as of late so disappointing.
I truly think the Rust Programming Language is an outstanding piece of technical writing (due credit to Carol Nichols as well) and commend a lot of the outreach and projects he’s been a part of, but as of late his takes are all pure beige prose bemoaning “the discourse” around LLMs and ATproto while making every excuse to hype up the tech.
The comment thread that inspired his dramatic exit was so mild that I don’t understand how anyone can take his claims at face value.
I get the impression, especially these last few months, that Klabnik is undertaking a heavily couched form of political speech. He appears to be deeply uncomfortable with anyone who would question the cloud-based, de facto centralized and commercially enclosed development and usage patterns that have built his career, and that informed ATProto’s heavyweight participation requirements as well as the entire AI-startup market. But rather than opening himself to that broader conversation, he instead attempts to manipulate these discussions by pathologizing individuals with whom he’s having a disagreement, on top of throwing in questionable arguments from authority.
Consider, for instance, lecturing quips like “Because you don’t always get to pick when you ship” or “They did extensive research on what was out there…” etc. from the lobsters thread. No room to discuss the confused product/protocol approach that Bluesky is taking, or that the “move fast break things” logic that one might apply to a web app does not really fit developing and documenting a broader protocol, if that’s what Bluesky is really trying to create. No room to question that this approach may have harmfully skewed the Bluesky team’s thinking about what they really need. It’s an echo of A16Z’s intentionally braindead “just build things” rhetoric, where the “builders” (formerly “founders”) are above reproach.
That is an incredibly weaselly way of approaching public dialogue, and has strongly impacted my trust in him for the worse. I think he probably feels a strong need to be perceived as level-headed and civil (“Quiet, Calm, and Sincere” as Something Awful’s community-complains subforum used to be called), as long experience leads a lot of internet denizens to fear discussion forums dying in a flamewar spiral, but uhhh… he’s not meeting that bar.
I saw people mentioning “Gas Town” like it’s a well-known meme and every time I searched it the top result was the GAS coin and I was like what’s going on, why is everyone talking about a meme coin, what’s even the root that is being memecoined here.
Well now I know and I need to puke, thx David, I love/hate you
“Gas Town”?
“Gas Town?!”
He unironically made the postapocalyptic wasteland from the cautionary tale, Mad Max: Do Not Make the Postapocalyptic Wasteland
This is the same pre-emptive irony as naming your brand of New Age crap “Goop”, only now with voluntarily plugging yourself into the machine that statistically simulates the ravings of a schizophrenic when it’s not generating child pornography, while setting up direct deposit to your dealer of meth, jimsonweed and Substance D
And its a fable about having to petition a mercurial and brutal authority for resources you need to live! A lesson that anyone who wants to make their living vibe-coding should ponder.
I went from “oh hey Steve Yegge I vaguely remember that name, what’s he up to these days?” to “Oh.” in the space of half a sentence
Someone at the It Could Happen Here podcast was making a prediction that someone at some point will make a big push for an “AI crypto”, which (under some pretext or another) you can only mine with AI datacenters. Because there’s like a real big amount of resources being burned on AI datacenters, and as the chatbots continue to fail to return anything at all on the massive investment, they’ll have to come up with a way to justify the datacentres’ existence at all. Maybe Yegge’s just ahead of the curve 🤷♀️
Same, and I’ve obviously heard the name from his blog.
Over time, it always gets easier to tell who writes blogs and who writes software.
I really wonder how many of the vibe coders get into vibe coding because after decades of writing code they simply hate the work. But they for some reason do not want to do a career change.
please basilisk let me never become this person
I read this yesterday with the most remarkable mix of emotions for a tech post: astonishment, revulsion, traces of hilarity, mounting disgust and disdain, shock, fear, dismay, pity, sadness.
For those who don’t know the name… Yegge has been writing (very very long) blog posts about tech for about 20 years now. In his early days he wrote some of the most insightful stuff about Lisp I’ve seen anywhere. One of his similes is an all-time favourite tech quote of mine that I have quoted before:
Scheme is an exotic sports car. Fast. Manual transmission. No radio.
Emacs Lisp is a 1984 Subaru GL 4WD: “the car that’s always in front of you.”
Common Lisp is Howl’s Moving Castle.
Source: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/11/ejacs-javascript-interpreter-for-emacs.html
Yes, this bloke wrote an Emacs addin that lets it run Javascript. That has implications: it’s important, it’s almost guaranteed to infuriate the Emacs purists, so he wouldn’t get much help, had to do it solo, and fast.
He got all excited about moving to S.E. Asia somewhere a bit before COVID. From a mention in this piece, I guess he married a local woman. That might explain it.
It didn’t pan out and he came back. He’s worked for a few of the FAANG type giants. Then he was going to revive his hobby videogame and make his millions from that.
Now he drank the Koolaid and his brain’s run out from his ears. It’s a damned shame. I didn’t agree with him about many things but he was very smart and really could write – text, not code, but code too.
There are a lot of highly opinionated people in tech. Few of them can write. Fewer of them can write short (it’s a real skill, hard to learn and hard to do) and few have the sheer patience and stamina to write long (which is the next best thing).
Yegge wrote long, and it was worth it.
One sad thing I’ve noticed due to vibe-coding is the amount of slop packages being spewed out for niche-but-hip languages like Common Lisp and Erlang. The lisp subreddit has a guy pulling up with a bunch of vibe-coded stuff, and somebody on Something Awful turned up with a CLI forums client that forwards through NNTP (???) written in Elixir that everyone thought was kinda neat for a second until they realized it was mostly slop.
Hard to say it’s making these language ecosystems any more “alive” if it’s all stuff that has to be re-evaluated and probably replaced entirely. And it definitely seems like Yegge isn’t the only one using this stuff to make absolute fever-dream architectural decisions that wouldn’t even be a consideration if they had to write it all themselves.
Also, I still find this one amusing:
Wednesday, December 01, 2010: Haskell Researchers Announce Discovery of Industry Programmer Who Gives a Shit
https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-announce-discovery.html
From Yegge’s stages of AI adoption:
Stage 5: CLI, single agent. YOLO. Diffs scroll by. You may or may not look at them.
Stage 6: CLI, multi-agent, YOLO. You regularly use 3 to 5 parallel instances. You are very fast.
Hot damn! This is exactly how I became an expert Linux sysadmin through running Gentoo. Maybe it is time for me to get on board the hype train! Just one question before I get started, though; how do I funroll an LLM’s loops?
He even cowrote a book with Gene Kim called Vibe Coding. Well, I say “wrote” — they used a chatbot for “draft generation and draft ranking”. They vibed the book text.
So how does one “vibe code” a book? Input a prompt and the LLM expands it into a book using statistically likely words?
Why not save everyone the trouble and just publish the “vibe code” prompt?
Rusty’s response nailed it imho:
You sling beads to a hook which activates a polecat according to GUPP. Jesse what the fuck are you talking about?
At first this all seems like gibberish, and it is. But I think Yegge is one of those people with an innate and preternatural sense of the power and purpose of naming things—someone who understands that names are marketing and marketing is not always about attracting the largest possible audience. In this case, the best outcome for Yegge is for Gas Town to appeal to a relatively small number of absolute sickos who vibe hard with his personal brand and who can usefully contribute to the project, and also for Gas Town to actively repel looky-loos and dilettantes like me (and probably you), who will only waste his time with a lot of stupid questions like “huh?” and “molecules?” and “did you say seances?” Oh yeah: there are seances. Don’t ask.
By this standard, Gas Town has apparently been very successful.
Nice to see Rusty still on the side of relative sanity. It’s almost like seeing CmdrTaco run in from backstage and nail somebody with a
steel chairASCII rendition of goatse
Was a Yegge fan. Sad to say, looks like he’s lost his f’ing mind.
MethLLMs: Not Even OnceYegge’s an extremely experienced professional engineer. So he put care into Gas Town, right?
I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to, which might give you pause.
This is a lack of care I’ve only really seen with vibe coding, and I still struggle to wrap my head around how someone can have an utter death of shits to give about something they’re making (if you can even call vibe-coding “making”). Its particularly stark for me when I compare it to the many, many artists I know online, who care deeply about their craft, and whose artwork deeply reflects that.
Just…what the fuck?
we don’t care, we don’t need to, we’re the token company
You know, that’s another thing about “AI”. I was alive at at time where you had two distinct kinds of people: The dreamers and the doers (although a few outstanding individuals managed to be both for good and for ill). If you were a cunt with nothing but get-rich-quick scheme, you either had learn how to technically realize your latest plan for world domination / massive fraud / broad spectrum robbery / indiscriminate destruction, or… Entice somebody with the required skills to risk everything to do it
withfor you. That drastically limited a lot of bullshit.Now? Well.
