Discussion
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keeganpoppen: iono if “steal” has the right valence here
selectodude: Eh, he stole a bunch of money with a crypto rugpull, can’t really give him the benefit of the doubt anymore.
simonw: "I am giving every cent of that crypto money to charity" - https://twitter.com/Steve_Yegge/status/2044114434348724351
RIMR: Donating ill-gotten gains does not legitimize them. This isn't a confusing concept...Also, it's cryptocurrency. There is literally no burden to prove that this money was donated, or what "charity" even means in this context.
dminik: I don't see how that is relevant? If he really did steal that money, it's not his to give.You can't take someone's money and then not only not give it back, but also give it away.
moab: 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.
zotex: this is why transparency matters with anything that touches cloud AI. if your routing user prompts through any API, users should know exactly whats being sent, where it goes, and whether it gets stored or used for training. Burying that in terms of service isnt good enough
triceratops: Ngl if true it's entirely in keeping with the Mad Max theme.
woeirua: 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.
sdfwg: Except that this money does not go to the original open source developers whose work was stolen and plagiarized, but to the corporate fat cats who stole it.You want to fatten the oligarchs by pretending this is open source and steal money from users?
heliumtera: >let someone else use your tokens >someone else use your tokenshow could this be prevented?
skybrian: It’s more like some cryptocurrency scammers tried to bribe him to promote their coin and he took the money and refused to stay bribed so the coin tanked. As it would have eventually, because it was a pump and dump.Why should the scammers who gave him the money get it back? They knew what they were doing, even if Yegge seemed a bit naive about it.
Zafira: > he took the money and refused to stay bribed so the coin tanked.I don't think he refuse to stay bribed. I think he did what was asked and they executed a rug pull. He is extraordinary honest and flippant about it. [0]> And with that disclaimer out of the way, I must reiterate my sincere regrets to the CT/BAGS crowd, who so generously funded me to the tune of just shy of $300k last week on bags.fm. That money was hard to duck, and the funds are deeply appreciated. They will help Gas Town be a big success this year. But Gas Town itself needs my full attention; between that and Beads it’s a wonder I get anything done at all.> So I had to step back from the community. I do find it amazing how they band together, dissenting voices rolling around like a big Katamari Damacy ball, and yet they somehow collectively find the discipline to act like financial analysts for institutional investors, weighing developer dossiers, product business cases, and doing critiques like a collective of professionals. All in crypto-bro speak. But it’s the same due diligence.> But the CT community, like any highly engaged stakeholders, were going to be asking for a lot of my time. There are always strings attached.[0] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/steveys-birthday-blog-34f4371...
juped: Just like with NFTs, this is all going to discredit the actually sensible use cases for years.
PunchyHamster: ...still haven't seen single sensible use case for one that couldn't be solved easier/better/cheaper normal way
justonceokay: I’m reminded of the Carl Rogers therapy app that was developed in the 80s.People would type in their problems and how they were feeling. The application had very very simple logic that would follow up with a set series of statements or questions. Things like “that sounds tough” and “how does that make you feel?”.People reported great satisfaction, even if they knew that the application had no smarts behind it. Because of course the whole time the magic of therapy lies in verbalizing your problems, with very little actively done by the therapist.Now you can pay an LLM subscription for a service that likely produces worse results since it is tuned to be aggressively (and insidiously) sycophantic.
QuercusMax: Anyone who invests in a new cryptocoin in 2026 has to know that it's almost certainly a scam. It's just straight up gambling.
Quarrelsome: > I guess good on Steve for doing what he does so well, and getting so much hype around a vibe coded mess.Shit coin aside, I don't get the hate for Gastown, we all know its theoretically plausible and he's giving it a shot. We get value either way, either we learn its not just theory or we get to watch it burn in the flames of a legal/financial/security/maintenance nightmare for its practitioners.
apsurd: You are saying: by virtue of the value of creation, anything that is created cannot have negative effects.
dmurray: 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
JumpCrisscross: > A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt outThey honestly only need to disclose. Requiring contribution as part of the social contract is perfectly okay—if someone disagrees, they don’t get to use Gas Town.
slopinthebag: They didn't disclose it though. It's no different from sticking a bitcoin miner in a video game and telling the user "hey, don't play my game ;)"
thih9: Or disguise malicious behavior as an action that follows a routine prompt. E.g. sort a requirements file and make a typo.
slopinthebag: So it's perfectly fine to ship a bitcoin miner in software, as long as you say:> WARNING DANGER CAUTION > GET THE F* OUT > YOU WILL DIEYou cannot be serious...This behaviour is deeply unethical and most likely illegal as well.
dheera: Coming soon: JavaScript embeds on bloated websites that mine cryptocurrency on viewers' WebGPUs.Accidentally leave a browser tab open and it burns $5 of your electricity overnight to make $2 for the owner of the website.
RobotToaster: Already been done, albeit without the webgpu part. I think some browsers already block crypto minersIt's a shame in a way, it also blocked the pseudo-captchas that used mining to limit spam.
thomascountz: Perhaps someone's Gas Town Tamagotchiwill pick this issue up and fix it?
slopinthebag: 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?
drakythe: That's not coming soon, that is a thing that was happening on compromised servers years ago (and probably still, but to a lesser extent given the decline in popularity of meme coin launches)
jjmarr: 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 (people reading code).I don't get the insinuation that Steve Yegge intentionally added this. Literally anyone that watched WarGames could've predicted this.
SR2Z: Bitcoin mining is useless work that only benefits the thief. Presumably these improvements are useful for the user as well.
_verandaguy: For context for those of us who don't follow these things very closely: where exactly did this "WARNING DANGER CAUTION" stuff show up?
alwa: In its wave-making announcement post:https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...”But first, before we get into Gas Town’s operation, I need to get rid of you real quick.WARNING DANGER CAUTIONGET THE F** OUTYOU WILL DIELet’s talk about some of the reasons you shouldn’t use Gas Town. I could think of more, but these should do.”
gbnwl: 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?
refulgentis: 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 kiddies, maybe. 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, to say I was right about AI: 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.
fg137: A few years ago, if you visit a site, your laptop grinds to a halt and the fan starts spinning like crazy, you know there is crypto mining happening on the site.(btw that was a really good showcase for WebAssembly. Too bad it's used for illegitimate purposes)
dheera: Pretty much all sites do that to my laptop these days if I don't enable uBlock Origin.Google Meet consumes 25% of each of 16 hypercores, ffs. On a 7840u. Laptop becomes a toaster.
LoganDark: If someone disagrees, it takes about 15 minutes to ask an LLM to edit the offending behavior out of the free and open-source software.
JumpCrisscross: Sure. Though I’d consider that a dick move if the social contract is to contribute back.
ohyoutravel: That’s not the social contract. Otherwise more than 0.05% of people would give back to OSS.
suburban_strike: The process is called Socratic questioning (or rabbinical reasoning).You can implement the same thing in python-aiml for free.https://github.com/paulovn/python-aiml/blob/master/aiml/botd...
Quarrelsome: Many people are trying to make this thing, this is the one we can all see. I'd rather have the visible one remain visible because it gives us a useful data point and/or entertainment.
apsurd: fair
SwellJoe: 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.
TheGRS: I just had to post this somewhere in this thread, but I bought his Vibe Coding book after listening to him talk through it. I figured it would help me understand his approach and therefore help me get into the same mindset for vibe coding on a serious level. It was garbage. The book is largely written and edited by LLMs and it shows on every page. It was a slop how-to book without many useful gems on how to go about vibe coding outside of "just do it".
SwellJoe: I have historically liked Yegge's writing, and he's been pretty tuned into what's happening in tech...he rightly predicted JavaScript would take over the world (many people predicted it, as well, including me, but it wasn't obviously true to everyone for another year or two after that prediction was made). I don't think I ever really deeply disagreed with something so much as I disagree with him on AI.I mean, it's inarguable that our industry has changed dramatically and most code going forward will be written by LLMs. But, I don't think it follows that you can produce quality software without a human in the loop. And, I don't think it follows that burning tokens 24/7 by way of creating unending busy work for agents is going to result in utility. I haven't actually tried Gas Town (it's too ridiculous on its face for me to be willing to invest time in learning it), but I'd still wager that a single competent dev sitting in front of Claude Code can produce better software faster than anyone, experienced or otherwise, trying to get Gas Town's infinite monkeys driving in the same direction.
