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?

  1) Who is organizing/arbitrating?
  2) Who is paying for the tokens? Is there some sort of funding or prize?

I 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

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".

Feels like a missed opportunity to not use Blockchain for the reputational ledger. A throwback reference to quaint, olden times.

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.

"DoIt" looks like "Dolt" in all too many fonts.

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.

This has the feel of onanism, sorry.

Is this cyberpsychosis?

The name, at least, is fitting.

This show has really lost the plot.

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.

Gas Town Wasteland is an elaborate growth hack for DoltDB

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...

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

I'm still choosing to believe this is all a joke.

This just in, society is cooked guys! I know this sounds incredible to believe, but we don't need society anymore.

Can anyone tell me what Yegge is on, so I can try some? Is it just money/tokens?

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.