alt.hn

4/14/2026 at 7:18:53 PM

Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

 https://steve-yegge.medium.com/gas-town-from-clown-show-to-v1-0-c239d9a407ec

by martythemaniak

4/14/2026 at 8:23:55 PM

> 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.

by bayarearefugee

4/14/2026 at 8:37:50 PM

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.

by avaer

4/14/2026 at 9:39:14 PM

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.

by Quarrelsome

4/14/2026 at 9:59:10 PM

> The important audit at my company is conducted by [Trump's second term] FDA.

Could work

by cma

4/14/2026 at 8:34:40 PM

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?

by siva7

4/14/2026 at 8:41:28 PM

Same institution I’d send Steve today.

The sanatorium from American Horror Story Asylum comes to mind.

Dominique, nique, nique…

by throwup238

4/14/2026 at 10:12:47 PM

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?

by Quarrelsome

4/14/2026 at 10:28:27 PM

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.

by throwup238

4/14/2026 at 10:29:47 PM

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.

by Quarrelsome

4/14/2026 at 10:31:20 PM

> 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 more 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.

by throwup238

4/14/2026 at 8:42:21 PM

"every 5th article is about no-code-solutions that sometimes work" might be unexpected but it's hardly the stuff of institutionalization.

by Avshalom

4/14/2026 at 10:31:12 PM

[delayed]

by 0xbadcafebee

4/14/2026 at 8:09:55 PM

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.

by mmastrac

4/14/2026 at 9:10:09 PM

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.

by _pdp_

4/14/2026 at 10:10:15 PM

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...

by en-tro-py

4/14/2026 at 9:43:04 PM

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

by RugnirViking

4/14/2026 at 9:19:00 PM

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

by IncreasePosts

4/14/2026 at 8:16:59 PM

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.

by rbtprograms

4/14/2026 at 8:22:05 PM

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.

by blahblaher

4/14/2026 at 9:16:02 PM

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.

by shermantanktop

4/14/2026 at 9:30:35 PM

I think the main thing he's produced using Gas Town is Gas Town itself.

by panzagl

4/14/2026 at 9:09:49 PM

> you can always fire it up yourself and see what its all about

I imagine it doesn't run very cheaply.

by root_axis

4/14/2026 at 9:14:40 PM

> 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?

by drekipus

4/14/2026 at 8:37:12 PM

> 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

by dist-epoch

4/14/2026 at 8:42:52 PM

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.

by Zafira

4/14/2026 at 8:44:49 PM

Does this mean you would avoid an article on PostgreSQL if it's from a company selling Postgres products or consultation?

by dist-epoch

4/14/2026 at 8:59:22 PM

It means they'd avoid an article on the benefits of smoking if it's posted by a company selling cigarettes.

by Leszek

4/14/2026 at 8:44:29 PM

This seems to be an AI-generated post where the "author" never reveals building any successful product or even tangible project with Gas Town.

by mtlynch

4/14/2026 at 9:02:15 PM

It's like Web 4.0 zombo.com

by joezydeco

4/14/2026 at 9:02:09 PM

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?

by torginus

4/14/2026 at 8:47:30 PM

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.

by bayarearefugee

4/14/2026 at 9:33:14 PM

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?

by tcoff91

4/14/2026 at 9:29:14 PM

I don't use LLMs and I never use agentic coding. And I too am interested in an answer to this question.

by tom_

4/14/2026 at 8:52:12 PM

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.

by vessenes

4/14/2026 at 8:09:25 PM

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.

by giancarlostoro

4/14/2026 at 8:53:41 PM

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?

by javawizard

4/14/2026 at 9:01:30 PM

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

by giancarlostoro

4/14/2026 at 10:28:47 PM

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?

by skybrian

4/14/2026 at 9:38:10 PM

Who closes the gate? Is it Claude itself after it runs the verification? Who makes sure the verification did in fact run?

by maleldil

4/14/2026 at 9:29:19 PM

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 …

by sailingparrot

4/14/2026 at 10:02:06 PM

> 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.

by rspeele

4/14/2026 at 10:14:07 PM

Reminds me of Urbit the completely exotic computer network

by cachius

4/14/2026 at 10:26:57 PM

That's fully veered into cult territory.

by actionfromafar

4/14/2026 at 9:38:20 PM

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.

by dbbk

4/14/2026 at 10:19:34 PM

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.

by CharlesW

4/14/2026 at 8:24:20 PM

The original Beads, it seems, used my CGO-free SQLite driver.

Seems like I'm back to obscurity.

:)

by ncruces

4/14/2026 at 8:56:29 PM

You got relegated to a stack of dirty stacked up crates, according to the genAI article images.

by a_t48

4/14/2026 at 8:46:22 PM

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?

by pianopatrick

4/14/2026 at 9:08:05 PM

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.

by peddling-brink

4/14/2026 at 10:07:45 PM

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.

by pianopatrick

4/14/2026 at 9:40:11 PM

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...)

by tom_

4/14/2026 at 9:08:45 PM

An apt name for something doing it's part to spike energy consumption and accelerate the climate crisis.

by cdrnsf

4/14/2026 at 9:36:12 PM

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.

by Quarrelsome

4/14/2026 at 9:52:13 PM

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.

by cdrnsf

4/14/2026 at 10:08:29 PM

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.

by Quarrelsome

4/14/2026 at 8:15:39 PM

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.

by solomatov

4/14/2026 at 9:10:57 PM

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.

by peddling-brink

4/14/2026 at 9:11:45 PM

I mean not how to do it, it's not that hard, but how to be productive with it.

by solomatov

4/14/2026 at 10:05:11 PM

> 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.

by munificent

4/14/2026 at 8:51:35 PM

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.

by throw1234567891

4/14/2026 at 7:47:42 PM

TBH this post still reads like a clown show.

by avaer

4/14/2026 at 9:48:13 PM

Read some of his earlier stuff. He’s a very informal writer, but he’s a damn good one with good ideas.

by moomin

4/14/2026 at 9:51:37 PM

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 describe the very trivial ideas contained in them.

by troupo

4/14/2026 at 8:04:33 PM

Yeah but the clown show is now marked 1.0 for release.

by righthand

4/14/2026 at 10:05:21 PM

[dead]

by jasonmp85

4/14/2026 at 8:27:31 PM

[dead]

by kitsune1

4/14/2026 at 9:30:28 PM

Yegge is a snake oil salesman

by winstonp

4/14/2026 at 9:34:11 PM

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

by dang

4/14/2026 at 10:20:03 PM

Does the apparent rugpull on the $GAS meme coin[0] qualify?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge#Vibe_coding_and_cr...

by karmakaze

4/14/2026 at 10:31:02 PM

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.

by actionfromafar