This is people having fun with a new technology that is far from perfect, is full of unknowns, but is ripe for exploration and discovery.
Gas Town itself is a piece of speculative fiction: throwing out a hypothesis as to what might be possible were inference to drastically drop in price. Its supervisor + isolated worker + merge factory approach is an experimental spike into how agentic coding could play out at scale.
And funnily enough, it is also the approach that Anysphere arrived at through their own experimentation.
Karpathy's alien technology metaphor is particularly apt. No one knows how to use these tools properly yet. We're having some success and a lot of fun, but really we're only going to find out by experimenting in public and sharing our results. Which means the positive and negative.
I will say that Gas Town is the most maximalist approach I’ve seen to accounting for the myriad flaws of current generation agents, essentially treating them as cattle and seeing if something of worth can be gained from a sort of brute force approach. I think that’s interesting, and I’m glad that someone built a (somewhat) working system to show what happens if you do that, because no one has built something like this (in public) before.
Overall I think it’s way better to think about this as a big gift basket full of ideas. Take the ones you like, regift the almonds to your cousin if you don’t like them. If someone sees me eating Gas Town banana cream truffle and goes “ZOMG, I NEED TO BUY $GAS NOW.” then that’s their problem, as neither Steve Yegge nor I are telling them to do that.