First is understanding what to build.
Second is getting the details right.
The best software is both the right software, and high quality. It’s bloody hard to do!
So, we do requirements gathering, and try to get the details right (TDD, continuous delivery etc).. it’s surprising to see Gas Town do none of this and optimistically hope agents will converge on good software by just throwing tokens at a wall and hoping it sticks.
So anyway, that’s what they’re ignoring. What are they actually doing???
It’s all for themselves.
Gas Town’s “product” is the warm fuzzies it gives people with money to burn, warm fuzzy feelings of being “at the frontier”. It’s a luxury product for nerds, and the only ones making money or selling anything are the big labs. There’s zero output or benefit to society because that’s simply not the point.
I think Gastown is truly special, but I wanted something more focused on learning as I think that's the real bottleneck. So I built AgenC to make it trivial to roll learnings back into your Claude.
Source: been watching both these guys closely, as I've been building my own agent factory focused on security + learning: https://github.com/mieubrisse/agenc
Does anyone have like, projects built using it? I couldn't find "look at the output" types of videos or articles or repos, only "look at the input" types of posts about it.
Scroll the game panel up a bit, turn off the mute button and click start game. A Morse code letter will be played, key it back on the iambic keyer. Pad 1 is for dits. Pad 3 is for dahs. (Dots and dashes for those new to Morse code.) Get it right and the game plays that letter and another random letter back out to you. After successfully sending each sequence back to the game, you get a one letter longer sequence. Just like the handheld Simon game. Link's below
I have seen both of these already. I've done the former personally, and I've seen links to at least kernels for the latter.
(I didn't do it via gastown, just regular old "use Claude".)
1) Who is organizing/arbitrating?
2) Who is paying for the tokens? Is there some sort of funding or prize?
This is trivial in a few hours with Claude Code
I keep adding things here and there, a couple hours everyday. Then after about a week I decided to switch the toolchain from TypeScript to Rust, how much work? A 5 minute planning session and a ~20 minutes implementation phase.
Trivial stuff indeed.
The question is the degree to which they can produce original things.
I've honed a relatively decent flow that requires interaction from me for important parts (mostly) while making its own decisions at the not-important parts (mostly). This results in being able to send the agent off on an hours-long dev cycle and have relatively decent results after that need a few minor fixes. I think this is the best style for the current generation of AI
Also there's the issue of how to identify systems-interface problems and posting those tasks for completion as well. No guarantee that a totally federated system will not solve interfacial issues faster than they generate them without feedback and oversight.
Yegge's Medium uses a serif font so you can tell, but in many faces you can't.
(We still get this comment constantly and it's very unfortunate)
You can be part of the new reputation economy, IF you can afford Multiple Claude Max subscriptions and use all your tokens for it.
Kind of like "getting good" at a collectible card game. It's more weighted toward whether you have money (and are willing to spend it) than anything else.
It's slop on top of slop on top of slop. It's not even quality slop. Apart from bloviated self-aggrandising blog posts, the ideas are trivial, and the execution is beyond horrendous.
Look beyond the ChatGPT-generated terminology to see the supervisors, loops and worker processes of Gas Town. Now it's a freelance board with AI agents as freelancers. But sure, polecats, mayors, stamps and character sheets. Whatever floats your upcoming crypto rug pull [1].
This is what he writes: "build stuff really, really fast. So fast that your biggest problem will be ideas." We've yet to see ideas built using the slopcoded monstrosities.
[1] https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vib...
ns;nt (No Skill; No Taste)
And if they don't, so what? Who cares? Why be angry at Steve for playing around with a fun hobby project that goes nowhere?
I'm not actually a database engineer with 30 years of experience. If somebody demanded that I pretend to be one, I guess I'd give it a shot, but I would expect any actual employer would be able to tell that I don't have the level of knowledge and experience that you'd expect from somebody like that.
If the base LLM actually has the knowledge of all of these specialties, why can't it just apply them all at once, instead of needing to be told to I guess pretend to be only one of them.
People dislike scam artists, hype artists and bullshitters. Especially when said artists had something actually useful to contribute once upon a time. E.g. Yegge's Platform Rant [1] is still required reading IMO.
Now he's uncritically and unapologetically pushes extremely low quality level AI slop while first trying to prop up Amp, then trying to sell a book, then trying to sell a crypto scam, now trying to sell a vibe-coded database. All the while proclaiming his projects have the basest of basic ideas but somehow need hundreds of thousands of lines of AI-generated low quality slop code to barely function.
The contempt here is the same as for idiots who uncritically run clawdbot and other AI bullshitters and grifters.
Compare this to @simonw who constantly evaluates coding agents, explains what he does in a coherent clear language that doesn't use ChatGPT to invent new inane terms for existing things, and stands behind his work and motivations: https://simonwillison.net
I mean, he can't explain what he's building except pickaxes to make more pickaxes, so it's a bit suspicious. It's just incredible how much impact he has had with this little hustle, given his products are basically turtles all the way down.
What impact did he have?
This reads like a speech from Pete Hegseth.
"Let's do war! Hard! Let's build stuff! Stat!"
Build what? Fight for what?
"The hell if we know! Just get busy dropping bombs, or "stamps" or whatever! Faster!"
In the end, all that's left is, indeed, a wasteland.
Is it for people with too much money and time on their hands to flex on Github?
I could at least understand the pitch if there was a crypto scam attached, or if folks were getting paid somehow (which might be an interesting social/AI experiment). But that doesn't seem to be the case.
All I can take from this is that you must spend more tokens.
This is all just performance art at this point, right?
I've not seen anyone take Gas Town seriously or even semi-seriously in the way people take Openclaw semi-seriously.
Gas Town certainly seems like a concept for performance art. The original blog post read like it, and so does this.
separate company, not aware of any association, dolt has been around for a while
Is this Ethereum related?
Help?
I'm good, thanks.
Reminds me of those 419 emails where the grammar is bad, the story makes no sense, but hey there really are people who expect $10 million to fall out of the sky because they already had $10 million fall out of the sky on them.