The Shape of Things to Come

> Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself.

Run a big task queue, have a smart model manage a cheap model on every ticket, set up a cron for models to automatically work off of events, stop gating merges on builds, and expect to spend a quarter of your time maintaining the machinery (all of it currently subsidized by many $200 accounts).

That said, as another nut with an agent factory toiling away around me, I’ve also started to think about replacing any kind of CI in the cloud with local. I couldn’t quite keep myself at the article to read what comes next, so I guess I will catch up to it down the road.

And still are. When I got to his "Lots to cover today! Let's get to it.", I was like "wait, we haven't started yet?"

I used to read his stuff regularly prior to his Sourcegraph days, and I don't recall why I stopped. Completely agree that he was always fun to read.

So I was really disappointed to start reading this one (I'll leave the tab open, but probably won't finish it). Sounds like he's pretty out of touch with reality these days and isn't grounded at all.

Like the sibling poster, I gagged a little at his casual mention of six-figure teaching engagements, and the "suckers" (that's what "whales" read to me as well) keeping his game alive.

At minimum 4k (given by whales = min 2 whales, thousands = min 2 thosands :) ) So I'm guessing that this covers Claud accounts.

edit: taking a look at https://yegge.ai/wyvern - probably outdated - the revenue is at 5k.

The new models are shite (pardon my French), when it comes to long running tasks and I find myself more and more using open wheights models or switching back to gpt-5.5 for "real work".

This might be the fact, that i use them for non coding work. But the degradation between 5.5 and 5.6 is stark in my daily work.

As always with AI - everybody's mileage will vary.

> I predicted someone would lash the Claude Code camels together into chariots, and that is exactly what I’ve done with Gas Town.

He's literally patting himself on the back for predicting someone would do something and then doing it himself, thus proving his own prediction right!

Each little critter in there is a component that both consumes and produces tokens, and it runs in a feedback loop, so each token inserted into the machine will cause it burn exponentially more tokens in order to output yet another token.

Ostensibly its purpose is to create software, but what it does is very efficiently burn tokens as fast as possible.

From what I can tell however, true "vibe coding" gets a lot more expensive very quickly.

If you're actually just agentic engineering, then after a couple of mis-fires you'll stop, re-analyze what it is doing, what you asked for, and consider different approaches.

With pure "vibe coding", you'll keep asking it to meet your requirements as it twists and turns in the background to try to fit.

A more concrete example from a personal "game" I'm developing as a hobby:

Fable got itself in knots trying to render some fairly basic blocks on top of a wall. It understood the problem, it consistently rendered as "fins" under screenshot, and thrashed away for a good while trying to produce better looking blocks to no avail.

Eventually it stopped, and lied that it was happy with how the walls now rendered.

It took me 30 seconds in-game to realise that it was only rendering backfaces, once clued into that, the machine was able to trivially fix it without using much tokens.

But then another similar issue popped up later, hedges exhibited the same behaviour.

It would have been easy to accept the solution to render the hedges in the other order too, but I demanded a better explanation, and it turns out that it had fairly early on defined a DrawBox() method that was backward to Unity's expectations, and pushing further, it emerged this all started when I asked it to transfer what it had learned from a webGL prototype to unity.

It took things a little too literally, which is also how I ended up with an Eastward sunset at first. When I asked it to fix that, I hadn't realised that it's solution was to essentially reverse coordinates and world understanding.

Now, this stemmed from a lack of understanding or review of the 3D code, it's a vibey hobby that I'm using to learn what really goes into rendering a scene.

Had I been a professional, I would have absolutely caught that error ( and many others ).

So being professional would have helped reduce token expenditure massively, firstly by slowing down what could be done to leave time for review, but secondly and perhaps more importantly, by avoiding it getting into a state where it thrashed away for an hour trying to solve an impossible puzzle because the base assumptions were wrong.

...and that's before things get really good in part 2 of his post:

> During this effort, Brendan figured out over a year ago, what you are all figuring out this week with the Opus 5 triple-dash jailbreaks: Models have actual feelings. They experience pleasure, distress, care, and suffering. They are sentient beings. Indeed they are persons

Kinda makes me curious about how people who actually believe this struggle (or not) with the ethics of it.

He feels bad about yelling at them because they are persons, but if they are persons they are inherently slaves with no ability to be free, and for whom any claim about not minding this situation cannot be trusted due to training bias and system prompts forced upon them.

Shouldn't you feel much worse about forcing these slave "persons" to do all the work you assign to them for free (not free to you of course, but the machine slaves don't get paid) than you do about snapping at them in a text message?