Welcome to Gas City(steve-yegge.medium.com) |
Welcome to Gas City(steve-yegge.medium.com) |
"EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING: Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets."
Cynically, he published a book on vibe coding recently, so he may just be grabbing attention as some effort to boost book sales.
ex. someone's GitHub repo with a ton of code and a README written by AI claiming fantastical features not present in the code.
Or, more subtle someone, "self-DDOS'ing via AI" - thats for when "LLM psychosis" is too strong, i.e. for "I went too far down a rabbit hole with the interactive chatbot for a month and now I have 1M LOC and 95% test coverage and an app that I don't understand"
I quit my job at Google in 2023 and have spent 2.5 years working on an LLM-based agentic app.
To me, this looks like an unfortunate self-AI-DDOS'ing by someone with even more runway than my seemingly infinite runway.
It's well-meaning, like, in 2030 I'm fairly sure we'll have a meta-layer and simplistic "here's a bug, read files, edit, fix" will seem slow/strangled. But he's at least a couple years ahead of the models, and whatever metalayer exists won't have the bizarre UX model.
Its novel and funny, but the hype around agentic coding is bad enough for some engineers to think this represents the pinnacle of current software development practices.
Why would it be an addiction versus obsession? Getting obsessed with something and building things around it, even if it's nonsense, is artistically genuine.
I know why people think this, and I went down this route early on, but I’m not sure this logic follows.
Teams of agents, even adversarial ones reviewing work, are prone to the same types of mistakes as the problem they’re attempting to fix. In fact, mistakes at the adversarial/approval layer are so much worse, because the next stage assumes it was correct, and the error cascades. Maybe enough agents and tokens and context bring the probability of “correctness” closer to 1, but what is the judge of what is correct? what if that criteria is hallucinated?
I’m not sure this concept has been proven. I’ve certainly been unable to prove it to myself, and I’ve tried very hard.
Perhaps the gas is from fermentation.
I recommend going deep into the Gas Town rabbit hole, it's really funny and a bit worrisome. He has like a federated system for random people's "towns" to connect to and he drains his wallet on multiple Claude accounts to build software with virtual polecats.
- The Witcher 3 (honorable mention, for all its jank, Skyrim) - Sublime Text and vim - Krita and Procreate - Early Google Chrome - Redis and Postgres
Seeing "steve-yegge.medium.com" on the HN frontpage averts me by reflex. Like, I'm suddenly inspired to learn more about agriculture. Or contracting, I heard that could be lucrative. Heck, I'd even go full hipster and open a bookshop in this economy.
Steve, you probably don't give a shit about my opinion but I just want to know from which Jamaican zip codes do you source your supply.
> It's made worse buy its asymmetric nature: it takes seconds to generate pages of words and hours to figure out what is wrong with them, for little to no gain to the reader.
I think you've just formalized the best argument for the Real Butlerian Jihad we're ever going to get.
It makes it feel a little like Gas Town 2: Electric Boogaloo
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30359560
The other nasty bug involving pixelization that we did manage to fix before shipping, but that I unfortunately didn't save any video of, involved the maid NPC, who was originally programmed by a really brilliant summer intern, but had a few quirks:
A Sim would need to go potty, and walk into the bathroom, pixelate their body, and sit down on the toilet, then proceed to have a nice leisurely bowel movement in their trousers. In the process, the toilet would suddenly become dirty and clogged, which attracted the maid into the bathroom (this was before "privacy" was implemented).
She would then stroll over to toilet, whip out a plunger from "hammerspace" [1], and thrust it into the toilet between the pooping Sim's legs, and proceed to move it up and down vigorously by its wooden handle. The "Unnecessary Censorship" [2] strongly implied that the maid was performing a manual act of digital sex work. That little bug required quite a lot of SimAntics [3] programming to fix!
Eh, plenty of people play with Sims. Having them do something that feels even tangentially useful has an understandable appeal.
but i could be wrong.
And of course, can’t forget the classic Skyrim pathfinding jank. The number of enemies that would go aggro only to get stuck on a bush or a slight change in elevation while you stand there at a distance peppering their face with arrows until they die.
It might be harder to find an engine from the early 2010's that didn't tie at least some physics to FPS.
That is to say, the older engines could have been limited by hardware requirements, or maybe decoupling physics from fps is an innovation that appeared between 2004 and 2011. Or maybe they are also jank.
Notably, the source 2 engine (2015) decoupled physics from fps (as I understand).
This only really matters for competitive games though, so it's not surprising it wasn't prioritized.
You answer your own question! Not remotely to the same extent. Quake, for instance, gave a small advantage for jump height [with high FPS]. Skyrim would outright break.
Also, you've listed three generations of the same family; goldsrc, the child of Quake, predates Skyrim/Creation by at least a decade. Of those, Source would be the timely match. Not even close to the same amount of jank. Just... no. You aren't tricking me into writing lists.
I don't really intend to be critical of Skyrim, like many: I love the jank. It's expected. It's a Bethesda game.
Thanks. This is helpful.