I use beads quite a bit, but not as steve intended. And definitely the opposite of "Gas Town," where I use the note-taking capability and integration with Git (that is, as something of a glorified Makefile and database) to debug contexts, to close the loop and increase accuracy over time. Nevertheless, it has been useful for large batch runs over my code base: the record has been processing for thirty hours straight while getting something useful, and enough trace data to make further improvements.
Steve has gone "a bit" loopy, in a (so far) self aware manner, but he has some kind of insight into the software engineering process, I think. Yet, I predict beads will break under the weight of no-supervision eventually if he keeps churning it, but some others will pick up where he left off, with more modest goals. He did, to his credit, kill off several generations of project before this one in a similar category.
To be fair, he's always been a little loopy. At least, I think this post of his was loopy: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/that-old-marshmallo...
It was also one of my favorite posts of his and has aged incredibly well as my experience has grown.
> but some others will pick up where he left off, with more modest goals
Already happening :-) https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/beads_rust
His latest post is endorsing a crypto exchange because they paid him $50k.
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-...