Discussion
Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns
samothrace: Reads like a scam. Obfuscatory language, outsized claims on future impact, excited opportunity advertisement, first-mover advantage, "no time for the rulebook, it's an inch thick!".I'm good, thanks.
hardwaregeek: I really want to host a vibe coding competition and see what can actually be made with these systems. Like if we’re doing insane token spends, it better be in service of creating amazing stuff. Can we make an entirely new programming language? Can we make an OS?
steveklabnik: > Can we make an entirely new programming language? Can we make an OS?I have seen both of these already. I've done the former personally, and I've seen links to at least kernels for the latter.(I didn't do it via gastown, just regular old "use Claude".)
dgathercole: The name, at least, is fitting.
qsort: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω
robotmaxtron: This show has really lost the plot.
avaer: What's the incentive for anyone to participate in this? It seems wildly expensive (in tokens), high mental overhead to understand, high hardware cost. So what's the upside?Is it for people with too much money and time on their hands to flex on Github?I could understand if, for example, folks were getting paid (which might be an interesting social/AI experiment). But that doesn't seem to be the case.
AstKaj: AI got to Yegge,too. What the hell is "Gas Town" and why should I watch AI generated furry stuff?All I can take from this is that you must spend more tokens.
rbtprograms: kinda reads like an advertisement for dolt?
cestith: Dolt is definitely the most interesting thing mentioned to me.
npilk: With LLM-based tools that inherently rely so much on the semantics of language, I wonder if there will be differences in code generated for the "wanted board" in the "Wasteland", compared to the "task list" in the "public square" or the "wish list" in the "Utopia".
pron: It's elegant because it's simple https://youtu.be/HHVPutfveVs
corporat: This is a classic example of a 'Solution in Search of a Metaphor.' Strip away the 5,000 words of Fury Road fan fiction and you’re left with a multi-agent wrapper for Claude Code that effectively automates the generation of technical debt. It feels like Yegge is trying to brand 'shoveling tokens into a furnace' as a new paradigm, but the cognitive overhead of learning his proprietary 'lore' just to manage a tmux session of LLMs is a massive net loss in productivity. We don't need a Wasteland; we need tools that actually improve the signal-to-noise ratio, not industrial-scale noise generators.
brendoelfrendo: I think this is part of the point, perhaps? I get strong Urbit vibes from the Gastown fanfic. Take a relatively simple concept, but invent an entirely new vocabulary to describe it. It satisfies the creator's ego, and acts as a filter for non-believers. People need to buy in to the creator's vision and commit to learning the lingo in order to engage. People who don't get dismissed as lacking the capacity to understand. In other words, cult behavior.
ramesh31: >Can we make an entirely new programming language?This is trivial in a few hours with Claude Code
avaer: This sounds like a great idea, but I think two questions need to be asked for this to make sense: 1) Who is organizing/arbitrating? 2) Who is paying for the tokens? Is there some sort of funding or prize? I wish we could get to UBI so we don't have to ask those questions.
Etheryte: In all honesty, if you scoped this well, one of the big players in the LLM space could definitely host a big marketing event on this spin. Get together a bunch of well known industry folks, have them vibe code a working <thing> in a given time constraint, presentations and prizes, lots of marketing.
juancn: I don't understand what this is about. What's a wasteland? What's a gas town?Is this Ethereum related?Help?
andrew_lettuce: Feels like a missed opportunity to not use Blockchain for the reputational ledger. A throwback reference to quaint, olden times.
plagiarist: I was thinking the same thing, should have put all the buzzwords together in one soup.
egypturnash: "DoIt" looks like "Dolt" in all too many fonts.
rektomatic: I legitametly thought it was Dolt until you pointed it out
zachmu: It is DOLT, you were right.
zachmu: lol it's DOLT, not DoIt.Yegge's Medium uses a serif font so you can tell, but in many faces you can't.(We still get this comment constantly and it's very unfortunate)
nkzd: I don't claim I am a good developer, but I seriously doubt any project which can't be explained with couple of sentences at most.
pocksuppet: "We pay for 10000 AI bots and it makes awesome software, which is invisible and undetectable by anybody except me. It gives me a sense of pride and accomplishment."
RGamma: [delayed]
skybrian: The database actually is named "Dolt." It's their own take on "git."https://www.dolthub.com/
verdverm: nit, Dolt is more a relational database with some git addons, i.e. it started from SQL to make it better, rather than starting from git and adding SQL
skybrian: Yeah, I meant the name is a play on 'git'.
verdverm: Remember when they did that dopamine abstinence movement?
corysama: https://www.historyofthebutton.com/ok-button-origins/
senordevnyc: It's saddening to see folks here on HN direct so much contempt towards this. I have no intention of messing with Gas Town or Wasteland, but I think it's cool that folks like Steve with lots of money and time are using it to build stuff they find cool and interesting. I doubt these projects are the future of AI agent orchestration, but I do think they're probably going to help us collectively learn better how to work with AI.And if they don't, so what? Who cares? Why be angry at Steve for playing around with a fun hobby project that goes nowhere?
zachmu: Regardless of whether this particular project goes anywhere, it's at least very interesting that Yegge has discovered a way to make multi-agent setups work better. Giving them discrete personas ("you are a senior database engineer with 30 years of experience") and narrower scopes makes them much more effective. This was surprising to me but makes a lot of sense in retrospect.
verdverm: How so? They only share a final letter in common
zachmu: https://docs.dolthub.com/other/faq#why-is-it-called-dolt-are...
alecbz: I'm still choosing to believe this is all a joke.
bloggie: Yesterday I wanted to change a white background to transparent on some clip art. I’m still learning Affinity so asked Google Gemini Nano Banana PRO 2. The output looked ok at first but the grey squares were a little off. They didn’t make a perfect grid. I opened it in mspaint and was able to erase the grey squares. It didn’t change the white background to transparent, it just drew an array of grey squares, but only good enough for a first glance. I have no idea how these AI tools can make anything of use if left to their own devices.
shepherdjerred: I would've asked Claude Code to write a program to do it
ozten: Gas Town Wasteland is an elaborate growth hack for DoltDB
citrusx: Let's see...You can be part of the new reputation economy, IF you can afford Multiple Claude Max subscriptions and use all your tokens for it.Kind of like "getting good" at a collectible card game. It's more weighted toward whether you have money (and are willing to spend it) than anything else.
troupo: > Why be angry at Steve for playing around with a fun hobby project that goes nowhere?People dislike scam artists, hype artists and bullshitters. Especially when said artists had something actually useful to contribute once upon a time. E.g. Yegge's Platform Rant [1] is still required reading IMO.Now he's uncritically and unapologetically pushes extremely low quality level AI slop while first trying to prop up Amp, then trying to sell a book, then trying to sell a crypto scam, now trying to sell a vibe-coded database. All the while proclaiming his projects have the basest of basic ideas but somehow need hundreds of thousands of lines of AI-generated low quality slop code to barely function.The contempt here is the same as for idiots who uncritically run clawdbot and other AI bullshitters and grifters.Compare this to @simonw who constantly evaluates coding agents, explains what he does in a coherent clear language that doesn't use ChatGPT to invent new inane terms for existing things, and stands behind his work and motivations: https://simonwillison.net[1] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
DragonStrength: If you can point to single product he has made through his "vibe-coding" that isn't for "vibe-coding," I think they would all relent.
The Wasteland was designed for federating work, but its metamorphosis into an RPG seems unstoppable at this point.
throwup238: > The Wasteland was designed for federating work, but its metamorphosis into an RPG seems unstoppable at this point.This is all just performance art at this point, right?
benwad: It reminds me of the time the band KLF burned £1 million in cash as a performance piece. They obviously regretted it afterwards.
andrew_lettuce: Or worse, public masterbation.
righthand: But using the milking machines from A Boy and His Dog.
to build stuff really, really fast. So fast that your biggest problem will be ideas.
bambax: > The Wasteland is a way to link thousands of Gas Towns together (...) to build stuff really, really fast. So fast that your biggest problem will be ideas.This reads like a speech from Pete Hegseth."Let's do war! Hard! Let's build stuff! Stat!"Build what? Fight for what?"The hell if we know! Just get busy dropping bombs, or "stamps" or whatever! Faster!"In the end, all that's left is, indeed, a wasteland.
