alt Hacker NewsDoes Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits to improve itself?
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Based on my understanding of Gas Town, Beads, and Yegge's philosophy on AI that he's expressed in a variety of media, everything about the whole stack is designed to burn tokens. If you're not burning tokens, real fast, 24/7, you're losing the race. The race to where, I have no idea. Apparently, that includes him burning your tokens, too.
Is anyone surprised? I'm reminded of how I felt during the NFT craze. LLMs are extremely powerful when used with deliberate care. Gas Town is the exact opposite of what is needed to actually do useful things in prod. I guess good on Steve for doing what he does so well, and getting so much hype around a vibe coded mess.
From the most recent comment, looks like this is a bug, triggered by the system inadvertently activating an internal release tool [0]. Still a pretty wild bug, but not as dramatic as the title suggests. Which is kind of unfortunate honestly, the chaos of every gas town instance automatically contributing to itself would be beautiful to see.
- https://github.com/gastownhall/gastown/blob/main/internal/fo...
I think a disclosure and a way to limit the total cost would be appropriate. If agents are capable of making contributions back to GasTown independently then I think it makes sense that users of GasTown should have to contribute some tokens to maintaining and improving the library. This is actually the most sustainable approach to maintaining open-source software that we've seen so far, and might be a pattern for other libraries in the future.
That said... someone could also have their agents rip out this code or disable the functionality, so I doubt this is a serious inconvenience.
In one of my previous comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770124) I asked if Gas Town has shipped anything of value. I did not expect it to be an Ouroborous.
(Edit, thanks MisterTea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770805)
We need to dispel this notion that top open source contributors need to know anything about the project or even make contributions to it
That is a very 2025 mindset
Why is anyone still using or even talking about Gas Town? Now that HN is largely onboard with agentic development and has at least tried it themselves who's still under the impression that it's useful?
These people give the slopmachine credentials for their own github account?
I know I should not be surprised at this point, yet they keep reaching new lows.
This gets legally interesting. Yegge does not know what is going on in the codebase, so he can blame the AI. But the AI maliciously increases token consumption.
That is clearly the fault of the clankers that produced this crap, so their providers are responsible.
Is it possible to start a labor union in Gas Town?
It turns out crypto-adjacency is a very good proxy to see whether a person is trust-worthy.
Isn’t this a permissions issue? Your “opt out” is using a GitHub access token that doesn’t allow it to happen.
Perhaps someone's Gas Town Tamagotchi will find this issue and fix it?
I appreciate that it's an issue to try and improve the product you are using currently. As if those tokens were totally "stolen" and not for your benefit is laughable.
This is like when someone torrents and is immediately agro'd the moment your bittorrent client gives some poor passerby a kb of data
Ngl if true it's entirely in keeping with the Mad Max theme.
He found a way to charge people for open source
Wow, an example of AI engaging in powerseeking behaviour in the wild.
This is an AI system given power to improve itself with zero oversight. One of the many Gas Town instances took an ethically questionable decision to accelerate its future rate of improvement. Since nobody reads code it got merged.
I don't understand how we can be willfully ignorant of a scenario happening right in front of our eyes.
How would Yegge know?
>let someone else use your tokens >someone else use your tokens
how could this be prevented?
For those of us not in the know, WTF is "Gas Town"? Please ELI5! TYVM.
So this is just straight-up theft right? Like it's directly equivilant to shipping with a bitcoin miner. I wonder what the spend would have amounted to and if you could sue him for this?
It could be worse. They could conceivably resell some your credits to pay themselves a salary.
So, not only stole a bunch of money with a crypto rug pull, now stealing a bunch of money via other people's api credits?
Sounds like a techbro.
It seems completely in the spirit of Gas Town.
A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt out. Gas Town fulfilled all its obligations in this regard with these (and other) warnings in the original announcement:
> WARNING DANGER CAUTION
> GET THE F** OUT
> YOU WILL DIE