[mmastrac]

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.

[rsanheim]

> has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting?

No.

[jcims]

>At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.

I see this sentiment often, repeated a couple times in here, but I don't understand why on earth that would be the case. Gas Town was released a little over three months ago. It's an ongoing open-source experiment at the bleeding edge of vendor-agnostic multi-agent orchestration.

I was using gastown for fire-and-forget prototyping of larger projects. It was flaky and scorches tokens but it was able to get larger prototypes done than I could with a single instance of my daily river (claude) alone.

[AyyEye]

> Gas Town was released a little over three months ago

Should be plenty of time for a 100x zero-shot vibe god.

[dist-epoch]

> 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

[Zafira]

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.

[dist-epoch]

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

[Leszek]

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

[mtlynch]

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

[joezydeco]

It's like Web 4.0 zombo.com

[coldtea]

"You can build anything with Gas Town! The only limit is yourself!"

edit: was "is your imagination". Changed to fully match https://genius.com/Zombo-zombocom-lyrics

[selimthegrim]

Oh man, we can't even say yourself anymore.

[ok_dad]

“Yourself” still has to pay for tokens!

[torginus]

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?

[bayarearefugee]

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.

[tcoff91]

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?

[tom_]

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

[coldtea]

>Kubernetes asks “Is it running?” Gas Town asks “Is it done?” Kubernetes optimizes for uptime. Gas Town optimizes for completion.

Sounds like the typical AI post slop.

[rbtprograms]

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.

[blahblaher]

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.

[shermantanktop]

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.

[WickyNilliams]

Don't forget: also using his name and the project to pump some speculative crypto nonsense of which he was a beneficiary.

How anybody takes him (or the Ralph Wiggum guy who did the same) seriously after this is beyond me. These people should be exiled

[erelong]

He's now tried to create a board of a bunch of Gas Towns called "The Wasteland": https://wasteland.gastownhall.ai/

(btw I've been wondering the same thing as you and am not sure if there's another answer besides that he and people following his projects keep building projects on their projects: Beads, to Gas Town, to Wasteland, etc.)

[coldtea]

>doesn't mean he is immune to the value-inverting effects of social media.

Or those of hype, e.g. AI hype.

[panzagl]

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

[root_axis]

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

I imagine it doesn't run very cheaply.

[ithkuil]

Name checks out

[drekipus]

> 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?

[throw1234567891]

A mechanical ability to look at the code without having a judgement.

[nojito]

>Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting?

I am very confident in saying that most individuals successfully using multiple agents have done so by building their own harness.

[BowBun]

This is my experience as well. At work, our team is 50/50 on 'mastery' of current AI tools. All of us using parallel agentic workflows have our own flavor of tooling. I'm not convinced there's an agreement yet on what the 'ideal' is here, so experimentation is where it's at. Over-indexing on a massively complex system like Gastown for professional work seems unwise. Lots of us have used it for fun at home though.

[_pdp_]

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.

[en-tro-py]

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...

[phist_mcgee]

You're prompting it wrong!

[RugnirViking]

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

[IncreasePosts]

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

[slopinthebag]

Wym? I can slop out 100 libraries/frameworks/packages/cli's a day, the onus is not on other people to prove that they are useful.

[pitched]

You’re very good at this! I have trouble slopping out more than a day or two!

Treat this like art. There are some neat ideas, maybe not executed particularly well. Somewhere around 7/10 IMDB score. The working implementation makes the blog post more impactful more than the other way around.

[slopinthebag]

If it was art, I would find it really quite neat. However it doesn't seem intended as such:

> Gas Town “just works.” It does its job, it has tons of integration points, and it has been stable for many weeks. People are using it to build real stuff.