alt Hacker NewsI don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment.
It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end.
And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and harumph at it for being Unprofessional and Not Serious and Not Ready For Production.
I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn't.
Maybe it's because we also have suits telling us we have to use neural nets everywhere for everything Or Else, and there's no sense of fun in that.
Maybe it's the natural consequence of large-scale professionalization, and stock option plans and RSUs and levels and sprints and PMs, that today's gray hoodie is just the updated gray suit of the past but with no less dryness of imagination.
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> If you read Steve's writeup
Personally I got about 3 paragraphs into what seemed like a twelve-page fevered dream and filed it under "not for me yet".
A sense of art and whimsy and experimentation is less compelling when it's jumping on the hypest of hype-trains. I'd love to see more folk art in programming, but Gas Town is closer to fucking Beeple than anything charming.
I like gastown's moxie, it's fun, and seems kind of tongue in cheek.
What I don't like is people me-tooing gastown as some breakthrough in orchestration. I also don't like how people are doing the same thing for ralph.
In truth, what I hate is people dogpiling thoughtlessly on things, and only caring about what social media has told them to care about. This tendency makes me get warm tingles at the thought of the end of the world. Agent smith was right about humanity.
Perhaps it was his followup post about how people are lining up to throw millions of VC dollars at his bizarre whimsical fever dream that disturbs people? I’m all for arts funding, but…
Its because people are treating the experiment like a serious path forward for their business.
"our industry has lost its sense of whimsy"
The first thing I thought as I read his post and saw the images of the weasels was that he should make a game of it. Maybe name it Bitborn.
It’s not the whimsy. It’s that the whimsy is laced with casual disdain, a touch too much “let me buy you a stick of gum and show you how to chew it”, a frustrated tenor never stated but dog whistled “you dumb fucks”. A soft sharp stink of someone very smart shoving that fact in your face as they evangelise “the obvious truth” you’re too stupid to see.
And maybe he’s even right. But the reaction is to the flavour of chip on the shoulder delivery mixed into an otherwise fun piece.
It isn't though. It crossed the chasm when Steve (who I would like to think is somewhat comfortable after writing a book, holding a director level position at several startups) decided to endorse an outright crypto pump and dump.
When he decided to monetize the eyeballs on the project instead of anything related to the engineering. Which, of course, Steve isn't smart enough to understand (in his own words) and he recommends you not buy but he still makes a tidy profit from it.
Its a memecoin now... that has a software project attached to it. Anything related to engineering died the day he failed to disavow the crypto BS and instead starting shrilling it.
What happened to engineers not calling out BS as BS.
> I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town.
Fear over what it means if it works.
>I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn't.
Remember the days when people experimented with and talked about things that werent LLMs?
I used to go to a lot of industry events and I really enjoyed hearing about the diversity of different things people worked on both as a hobby and at work.
Now it's all LLMs all the time and it's so goddamn tedious.
Yeah it's unbelievably tiresome, endless complaints from people pushing up their glasses complaining, ITS A PROJECT ABOUT POLECATS CALLED GAS TOWN MADE FOR FUN, read that again, either admire it and enjoy it or quit the umpteenth complaint about vibecoding.
Yeah where he probably Burns like a million dollars of money.
Just for fun!
> If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment:
So, Steve has the big scary "YOU WILL DIE" statements in there, but he also has this:
> I went ahead and built what’s next. First I predicted it, back in March, in Revenge of the Junior Developer. I predicted someone would lash the Claude Code camels together into chariots, and that is exactly what I’ve done with Gas Town. I’ve tamed them to where you can use 20–30 at once, productively, on a sustained basis.
"What's next"? Not an experiment. A prediction about how we'll work. The word "productively"? "Productively" is not just "a big fun experiment." "Productively" is what you say when you've got something people should use.
Even when he's giving the warnings, he says things like "If you have any doubt whatsoever, then you can’t use it" implying that it's ready for the right sort of person to use, or "Working effectively in Gas Town involves committing to vibe coding.", implying that working effectively with it is possible.
Every day, I go on Hacker News, and see the responses to a post where someone has an inconsistent message in their blog post like this.
If you say two different and contradictory things, and do not very explicitly resolve them, and say which one is the final answer, you will get blamed for both things you said, and you will not be entitled to complain about it, because you did it to yourself.