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 make this point to say, if someone were to try to claim this approach as IP we should expect it to be denied right?
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.
Gastown is fun in the same way time cube is.
If it smells like bullshit and looks like bullshit there's little need to eat it to make sure it tastes like bullshit too.
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.
Not in a dunk style reply. Just more: you fail to see it.
They're saying "this is a very thoughtful way to approach orchestration for using AI coding agents". This experiment is profound not because it works or because its THE end game, but rather it's a novel approach worth testing...but so is Ralph AI.
So this paragraph from the "Welcome To Gas Town" article [0] suggests to me that real, sustained users of a Gas Town instance are paying far, far more than -say- 600USD per month:
Gas Town is also expensive as hell. You won’t like Gas Town if you ever have to think, even for a moment, about where money comes from. I had to get my second Claude Code account, finally; they don’t let you siphon unlimited dollars from a single account, so you need multiple emails and siphons, it’s all very silly. My calculations show that now that Gas Town has finally achieved liftoff, I will need a third Claude Code account by the end of next week. It is a cash guzzler.
Compared to USian programmer pay (especially Yeggie-level pay), 600 USD/month absolutely does not qualify as "a cash guzzler". Hell, that's less than the cost of the sort of health insurance you usually get at nice software companies.
I suppose that there's an alternative interpretation where Yeggie is concerned about the actual cost to the LLM company for the queries that Gas Town makes... but that seems unlikely to me. First, why would he care? Second, why would he say "You won’t like Gas Town if you ever have to think, even for a moment, about where money comes from."? I would give zero shits about where my LLM company's money comes from... that's not my problem.
[0] <https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...>
The codebase that versions funness intervals of people?
After all, if folks that make real, sustained use of Gas Town are permitted to do it for 200, 400, or 600 USD per month, then widespread use of Gas Town absolutely destroys the heavy subsidy that his use of Gas Town theoretically relies on.
No, I don't buy it.