[phpnode]

I'm pretty excited about agentic coding myself, but this does appear to be an extended ai-psychosis (i'm not super comfortable with this phrase, but it is becoming pretty recognisable).

I think he's boxed himself in by continually layering more complexity on his approach, rather than stepping back and questioning the fundamentals or the overall direction.

All of the steps Gas Town or Gas City etc are taking are towards reducing human oversight and control. This is profoundly misguided! In a world of infinite cheap software it is precisely this human decision making and control that matters.

> There will be nothing like it. You are going to want to use Gas City.

No. I do not want to talk to the mayor of my software factory, as its cartoonish minions build an infinite mountain of slop. Unreviewable, both in terms of code and the finished product.

Instead, I want to precisely capture human ideas, have those ideas questioned, challenged, improved, and then I want to bring those ideas to life, keeping the human in the loop whenever they want. Neither Beads, Gas Town, nor Gas City or anything like them are required for that.

[tveita]

Building harnesses does seem like a task that's particularly conductive to psychosis. I've wondered if it's because there is no push-back; almost anything you try will be "right" in that your changes appear to make things happen. "Oh look I added a carpenter and now it's walking around and making notes about the scaffolding" So you get to stay in your flow state without reassessing if the concepts you are forming are ultimately meaningful.

Although I think the post also self-diagnoses some factors that also help:

  With the Gas Town Mayor, you feel like you’re operating at a special level, a VIP, above all the workers. You are talking to someone important: the mayor of a factory the size of a town. You have access to someone with resources, someone who gets you, someone who appreciates how busy you are.

  Working with regular coding agents just doesn’t give you that special feeling.

[Alex_L_Wood]

I think at this point it’s all but confirmed that LLMs sycophantic tendencies coupled with yes-man attitudes produce AI psychosis and AI fanaticism. Especially if you’re already of high opinion of yourself (be it deserved or not).

[antonvs]

I’ve wondered whether this is all supposed to be a satire on the industry. But unintentional self-parody is also a possibility.

[sailingparrot]

[deleted]

[2001zhaozhao]

> All of the steps Gas Town or Gas City etc are taking are towards reducing human oversight and control. This is profoundly misguided!

I mostly agree with you other than this one sentence.

Let's say you're building the literal antithesis of Gastown: an AI agent software specifically designed to be human reviewed and monitored. How to you make this as efficient as possible? Well, it's by ensuring high quality results from human oversight and control while spending the least amount of time. Which to be precise, is still reducing human oversight and control per unit of useful work done.

[phpnode]

It's really about granularity - when I'm building something there are parts of the system where I want very fine-grained control and oversight over what is built and how, and there are others where... it just doesn't really matter. What matters to who is contextual - a software architect tends to care about different things from a product manager for example. This is the idea of gradual specification - I should be able to defer some decisions to the AI and exercise full control over other aspects, but it's the humans that should be able to choose what level they want to work at.