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[return to "The age of Pump and Dump software"]
1. Leynos+Ck[view] [source] 2026-01-27 15:33:49
>>brisky+(OP)
Here's a counterthesis:

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.

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2. storys+Fr[view] [source] 2026-01-27 16:04:06
>>Leynos+Ck
The supervisor-worker architecture is standard for distributed systems, but I'm not sure the unit economics make sense yet. Given current latency and inference costs, that specific pattern seems significantly more expensive and slower than a human developer.
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3. simonc+et[view] [source] 2026-01-27 16:09:22
>>storys+Fr
> 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.

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4. htrp+p91[view] [source] 2026-01-27 18:50:52
>>simonc+et
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)
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5. storys+0h1[view] [source] 2026-01-27 19:19:54
>>htrp+p91
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.
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