alt Hacker NewsHere's a counterthesis:
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.
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The supervisor-worker architecture is standard for distributed systems, but I'm not sure the unit economics make sense yet. Given current latency and inference costs, that specific pattern seems significantly more expensive and slower than a human developer.
is it not also one of the most logical approaches to experiment with first? it's loosely how I've been working with agents as well.
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?
I fail to see how anyone had fun with cursors Web browser.
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 don't understand why people see basic automation of the SDLC and think to themselves "this dude cracked the orchestration code" as if it's something profound.