"What if Opus wrote the code, and GPT 5~ reviewed it?" I started evaluating this question, and started to get higher quality results and better control of complexity.
I could also trust this process to a greater degree than my previous process of trying to drive Opus, look at the code myself, try and drive Opus again, etc. Codex was catching bugs I would not catch with the same amount of time, including bugs in hard math, etc -- so I started having a great degree of trust in its reasoning capabilities.
I've codified this workflow into a plugin which I've started developing recently: https://github.com/evil-mind-evil-sword/idle
It's a Claude Code plugin -- it combines the "don't let Claude stop until condition" (Stop hook) with a few CLI tools to induce (what the article calls) review gates: Claude will work indefinitely until the reviewer is satisfied.
In this case, the reviewer is a fresh Opus subagent which can invoke and discuss with Codex and Gemini.
One perspective I have which relates to this article is that the thing one wants to optimize for is minimizing the error per unit of work. If you have a dynamic programming style orchestration pattern for agents, you want the thing that solves the small unit of work (a task) to have as low error as possible, or else I suspect the error compounds quickly with these stochastic systems.
I'm trying this stuff for fairly advanced work (in a PhD), so I'm dogfooding ideas (like the ones presented in this article) in complex settings. I think there is still a lot of room to learn here.
It's cool to see others thinking the same thing!
Re artificial uplifting a.k.a. re-upping, see >>26998308 and https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
Update: I was hoping it'd at least be smart enough to automatically test the project still builds but it did not. It also didn't commit the changes.
> are you the mayor?
Yes. I violated the Mayor protocol - I should have dispatched this work to the gmailthreading crew worktree instead of implementing it directly myself.
The CLAUDE.md is clear: "Mayor Does NOT Edit Code" and "Coordinate, don't implement."
Pros: The overall system architecture is similar to my own latest attempt at solving this problem. I like the tmux-based console-monitoring approach (rather than going full SDK + custom UI), it makes it easier to inspect what is going on. The overlap between my ideas and Steve's is around 75%.
Cons: Arguing with "The Mayor" about some other detached processes poor workmanship seems like a major disconnect and architectural gap. A game of telephone is unlikely to be better than simply using claude. I was also hoping gastown would amplify my intent to complete the task of "Add feature X" without early-stopping, but so far it's more work than both 1. Vibing with claude directly and 2. Creating a highly-detailed spec with checkboxes and piping in "do the next task" until it's done.
Definitely looking forward to seeing how the tools in this space evolve. Eventually someone is bound to get it right!
P.s. the choice of nomenclature throughout the article is a bit odd, making it hard to follow. Movie characters, dogs and raccoons, huh? How about striving for descriptive SWE clarity?
Has to be close for the shortest time from first commit to HN front page.
Town = Central orchestrator / control plane
Rig = Project or workspace namespace
Polecat = Ephemeral worker job
Refinery = Merge queue manager
Witness = Worker health monitor
Crew = Persistent worker pool
Beads = Persistent work items / tasks
Hooks = Work queues / task slots
GUPP = Work processing guarantee
Molecules/Wisps = Structured, persistent workflows
Convoys = Grouped feature work units
Despite it's quirks I think beads is going to go down as one of the first pieces of software that got some adoption where the end user is an agent
Show HN: I replaced Beads with a faster, simpler Markdown-based task tracker - >>46487580 - Jan 2026 (2 comments) (<-- I've put this one in the SCP - see >>26998308 for explanation)
Solving Agent Context Loss: A Beads and Claude Code Workflow for Large Features - >>46471286 - Jan 2026 (1 comment)
Beads – A memory upgrade for your coding agent - >>46075616 - Nov 2025 (68 comments)
Beads: A coding agent memory system - >>45566864 - Oct 2025 (1 comment)
The POS software's on GitHub: https://github.com/sde1000/quicktill
But when high level languages were getting started, we had to read and debug the the transformed lower level output they made (hello C-front). At a certain point, most of us stopped debugging the layer below and most LLVM IR and assembly flow by without anyone reading it.
I use https://exe.dev to orchestrate several agents, and I am seeing the same benefits as Steve (with a better UI). My code smell triggers with lots of diffs that flow by, but just as often this feeling of, "oh, that's a nice feature, it's much better than I could have made" is also triggered. If you work with colleagues who occasionally delight and surprise you with excellent work, it's the same thing.
Maybe if you are not used to the feeling of being surprised and mostly delighted by your (human) colleagues, orchestrated agentic coding is hard to get your head around.
He is so in love with his own voice.
Try to find actual screenshots of this shit or what it really does in the 200 000-word diarrhea (funnily he agrees it's diarrhea [1]).
---
He also references his previous slop called beads. To quote, "Course, I’ve never looked at Beads either, and it’s 225k lines of Go code that tens of thousands of people are using every day".
It's slop to a level that people create extensive scripts to try and purge it from the system since it infects everything you do: https://gist.github.com/banteg/1a539b88b3c8945cd71e4b958f319...
Do not listen to newly converted or accept anything from them. Steve Yegge used to be a good engineer with great understanding of the world. Now it's all gupps and polecats
[1] Quote from the article: "it’s a bunch of bullshit I pulled out of my arse over the past 3 weeks, and I named it after badgers and stuff."
We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. … https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/filippo-tommaso-ma...
I'm excited the author shared and so exuberantly; that said I did quick-scroll a bunch of it. It is its own kind of mind-altering substance, but we have access to mind-bending things.
If you look at my AgentDank repo [1], one could see a tool for finding weed, or you could see connecting world intelligence with SQL fluency and pairing it with curated structured data to merge the probabilistic with the deterministic computing forms. Which I quickly applied to the OSX Screentime database [2].
Vibe coding turned a corner in November and I'm creating software in ways I would have never imagined. Along with the multimodal capabilities, things are getting weirder than ever.
Mr Yegge now needs to add a whole slew of characters to Gas Town to maintain multi-modal inputs and outputs and artifacts.
Just two days I go, I had LLMs positioning virtual cameras to render 3D models it created using the Swift language after looking at a picture of what to make, and then "looking" at the results to see the next code changes. Crazy. [3]
ETA: It was only 14 months earlier that I was amazed that a multi-modal model could identify a trend in a chart [4].
[1] https://github.com/AgentDank/dank-mcp
[2] https://github.com/AgentDank/screentime-mcp
[3] https://github.com/ConAcademy/WeaselToonCadova/
[4] https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ollamatea/blob/main/cmd/ot-...
"Psychedelics are the latest employee health benefit" (tech company) https://www.ft.com/content/e17e5187-8aa7-4564-9e63-eec294226...
"A new psychedelic era dawns in America" (specifically about use in california) https://www.ft.com/content/5b64945f-da21-46d9-853f-c949a95b9...
"How Silicon Valley rediscovered LSD" https://www.ft.com/content/0a5a4404-7c8e-11e7-ab01-a13271d1e...
I could go on, but the knowledge that psychadelic drugs are prominent in the tech community is not a new fact.
https://github.com/shepherdjerred/scout-for-lol/blob/main/es...
But to keep things tractable, i've kept the orchestration within a collection of subagents in a single Claude code session. The orchestration system is called Pied-Piper and you can find the code here - https://github.com/sathish316/pied-piper
It is only 1.6k Lines of Go code.
I'm on my second agent orchestration framework, Omnispect - https://omnispect.dev/
Example created by Omnispect:
Oneshot - https://omnispect.dev/battleclone00.html
Polished - https://omnispect.dev/battleclone04.html
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/how-ai-labs-are-solvin...