alt Hacker NewsWhy 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?
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I was about to post this same q, but saw yours and somehow that switched me from "wtf?" to "I have an answer.": There's just such interest in anything.
To wit, I still can't believe OpenClaw blew up, and it's much less......opinionated, than whatever is going on here. (deacons?)
Non-SWE TradMom™ posted on X™ yesterday about her OpenClaw that is set up with all her accounts so every morning she can get a family summary. She added a hunk with a bunch of stuff amounting to "PLEASE don't do anything insecure!", and the OpenClaw founder retweeted approvingly.
I left Google 3 years ago to build something. I'm very fond of the OpenClaw founder. And yet, absolutely cannot believe that he let such an obvious UX and security mess out into the world. We grew up in the same incubator (~2008 iPhone OS twitter) and presumably share the same values yet came to polar opposite conclusions.
Why do I view it as such a necessity to have a GUI/multiplatform/built in Willison Trifecta stuff that I'm still pounding away 2.5 years in and won't release, when, clearly you don't need that stuff?
I think in a steady state, product and UX discipline will win out. I bet within 3 months Gastown is a ghost town with maybe some non-technical crypto fans. In a year, OpenClaw is probably around, but not nearly the mindshare. It'll be quietly de-invested via OpenAI carefully managing the OpenClaw founder into working on their Everything App. (This is already happening: he got a nice PR interview with an OpenAI lead previewing the Everything App.)
Another anecdote re: demand:
My completely non-technical nurse ex-girlfriend from high school called me two weeks ago, for the first time in years. Lede was I was right about AI, and the substance was: via Claude Code, she built her own Ollama-based Mac Mini server that she could connect to remotely via an Expo app.
Does it work? Astoundingly, yes.
She also has no idea what is going on. She swears up and down that her AIs on Claude.ai, ChatGPT.com and Ollama are somehow talking to each other, and she does not mean APIs. She tried answering a Q I had about a graph visualization of her chats by talking to ChatGPT.com about it, even though Claude Code had wrote it, and I just didn't bother saying anything.
Times are strange.
The value you get out of a simpler adversarial loop to critique your "main" agent's work is high. Stacking Steve Yegge's personal Kingdom of Nouns on top of each other doesn't add much more.
And this doesn't even begin to get into the madness that is verification for software that matters and is exposed through multiple modalities. You cannot let an agent just vibe its way around "does this business-critical thing with these specific use cases do its job correctly", much as Yegge might have you believe.