[simoncion]

> The supervisor-worker architecture is standard for distributed systems, but I'm not sure the unit economics make sense yet. ... [T]hat specific pattern seems significantly more expensive and slower than a human developer.

Yeggie very explicitly states that Gas Town is for people who give zero shits about how much money they're forking over to their LLM company. If I remember correctly, he said that he had to get a second entire account because of how much money he was spending.

[htrp]

The better comp is how much gastown would cost if it weren't on subsidized the 200$ per month claude max plans (even if he is using 2 of them)

[storystarling]

Fair point. I suspect if you priced that workload out on per-token API costs, it would be completely unviable for a bootstrapped business. The flat-rate subscription is really the only thing making it accessible right now.

[simoncion]

> The flat-rate subscription is really the only thing making it accessible right now.

So this paragraph from the "Welcome To Gas Town" article [0] suggests to me that real, sustained users of a Gas Town instance are paying far, far more than -say- 600USD per month:

  Gas Town is also expensive as hell. You won’t like Gas Town if you ever have to think, even for a moment, about where money comes from. I had to get my second Claude Code account, finally; they don’t let you siphon unlimited dollars from a single account, so you need multiple emails and siphons, it’s all very silly. My calculations show that now that Gas Town has finally achieved liftoff, I will need a third Claude Code account by the end of next week. It is a cash guzzler.

200 USD per month is something that I -as a working programmer- wouldn't think twice about spending for a fantastically useful tool (even if I had to spend it from my own pocket). If I had to pay 600 USD/month out-of-pocket, it would have me thinking for a bit to see if it was really worth it, but if the company was footing the bill, I'd expense it without a second thought.

Compared to USian programmer pay (especially Yeggie-level pay), 600 USD/month absolutely does not qualify as "a cash guzzler". Hell, that's less than the cost of the sort of health insurance you usually get at nice software companies.

I suppose that there's an alternative interpretation where Yeggie is concerned about the actual cost to the LLM company for the queries that Gas Town makes... but that seems unlikely to me. First, why would he care? Second, why would he say "You won’t like Gas Town if you ever have to think, even for a moment, about where money comes from."? I would give zero shits about where my LLM company's money comes from... that's not my problem.

[0] <https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...>

[knollimar]

He would care because the 200/m relies on users not using the whole allotment and is likely heavily subsidized. What if the true cost is 4x? (Feel free to add api pricing numbers and correct). Is a programmer willing to spend 2400/month?

[simoncion]

If he did care, then why would he advertise and widely make the tool available? Wouldn't he keep it a secret closely held between him and his friends and colleagues?

After all, if folks that make real, sustained use of Gas Town are permitted to do it for 200, 400, or 600 USD per month, then widespread use of Gas Town absolutely destroys the heavy subsidy that his use of Gas Town theoretically relies on.

No, I don't buy it.