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.
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.
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.
It feels worth separating two things here that have unfortunately become commingled: crypto pump and dumps and AI-enabled spikes.
Haven't we learned by now that all crypto coins are pump-and-dump schemes? Unless you're HODLing BTC or whatever... (yes, I'm a huge crypto skeptic)
As for the actual software, why isn't it worth exploring how to better incorporate this current wave of AI into our lives? I've idly wondered what an "AI coding factory" would look like, and Gas Town is an interesting instantiation of the idea. I've also wondered how to best incorporate memory and personal knowledge into an agent that I can self-host. Clawdbot (now Molt?) is an interesting take. People exploring these ideas shouldn't be shot down.
What I fail to understand is why anybody would buy a coin attached to these projects: what are the buyers expecting to happen to the coin? Is this yet another instance of the greater fool theory[1] that we saw with NFTs?
I also fail to understand why the creators are getting involved. I guess the author is trying to answer that question. I'd like to think of a more charitable interpretation than reputation laundering, but I'm not sure what it is... I'm open to suggestions :)
The framing of the title makes me wonder what we as humans will think of software from this time 100s of years from now. Will the future be a complicated, dense ecosystem of interconnected intelligent systems, putting our current complexity to shame?
Or in the future will we look at the current time as the Wild West, the time when software moved more swiftly than the law. Where oil was there for anyone with a big enough guns to protect it.
Maybe we will experience our own butlerian jihad and realize that the thinking machines were controlling us the whole time. We will look at TikTok how we now look at the proliferation of ether in the 1800s.
The Vernor Vinge SF novels have the profession of "software archaeologist", someone who digs through the layers of systems in order to extract understanding.
I think software is about to become disposable and that’s uncharted territory. Furniture used to be carefully handcrafted and was meant to be passed on for generations. Now that’s a bit of a quaint idea and you probably don’t want your parents’ old couch. There’s a good chance it came flat packed and you assembled it yourself. At work there’s constant nail biting over generating low-quality code. I can’t help but wonder, why reuse any of it? What do you need libraries for? If it’s not hard to specify, it’s practically free to produce now.
Probably the RAG AIs of the future will use it to help generate their users’ software. The AIs themselves might as well use the simple conventionally posix-y stack that we’re all familiar with, because they won’t have any trouble remembering complex invocations. But I bet they also won’t need as deep a stack (why have framework on framework on frameworks if you are an AI and don’t mind boilerplate and tedium?), so they’ll need a source for what over-complicated code looks like.
It would be interesting to see if there would be a market for handcrafted/vintage software the way there is one for luxury items like expensive watches.
The sheer power of AI astroturfing right now is kind of blowing my mind, and not in a good way.
In the span of roughly 3 days, I went from never once having heard the terms "clawdbot" or "gas town" to seeing them brought up repeatedly throughout every single tech discussion space I frequent (with no real use cases ever brought up, of course, just vague claims it being the next big thing, I still have no idea what either of these things actually do).
This "clawdbot"'s github repository apparently went from 5k stars to 70k stars in the span of a week, according to the graph proudly displayed on the readme. And I'm supposed to believe these are 70k real people, not 70k bot accounts.
I think this is the final nail on the coffin for human-to-human communication on the internet. I'm just going to assume it's all bots now.
Pump and dump software is a hilarious phrase but I thought it would have meant something slightly different. My idea of pump and dump software is the proliferation ai-generated sites (Vercel links) that are sent to the 404 graveyard after a few days of someone not getting any traction on it.
Noticed the same. Doing a quick analysis of clawdbot myself I figured there are many spam domains that are used to backlink. Now there is a new domain being advertised as a replacement of the original. It points to the same landing page though it is hard to say if this comes from the original authors. All of it seems to be related to a crypto scheme. The astroturfing on reddit is also pretty bad.
This is obviously in a blip in the grand scheme of things but it is just an indication what all of these social media platforms are destined to become without some sort of intervention.
Fwiw the new 'maltbot' (molt.bot) is the legit one and can be verified on the official github repo which has had its org changed and loads here: https://github.com/moltbot/moltbot (the original redirects for some added reassurance).
My understanding it was a very quick rebrand due to Anthropic sending a takedown notice so theres still references to the old name.
Excellent article! Let’s also not forget another major category where they dump the vibe-coded crap: the AI-hype social-media “developer” influencer FOMO posts. Essentially a life-coach pyramid scheme repackaged for tech, selling “how to become a life-coach” playbooks to the next wave of would-be life-coaches to sell their course.
That has been a thing prior to the rise of LLMs. Tech-bros with their "astonished" faces look with the sub-title of "You need to learn kubernetes, docker, swarm!" etc.
It's just par for the course in our attention economy. Like another poster had said, quite a bit of this is just simple experimentation that occurs.
I recently had cursor basically make me a web interface to detect skiers in a live stream at my local mountain. The stream shows skiers coming off the lift with their back towards the camera. I wanted to know the average lap time of skiers to better estimate the lift line wait time since the lift itself has no camera.
It did a really good job with some prompting for fixes along the way. Turns out, it's really hard to individually ID people who are basically wearing the same thing and with similar colors.
All that is to say, I used it for an hour to see if my idea would work and be feasible.
Rapid prototyping has always seem to me as the most viable use for generative AI, especially in software. Being able to quickly produce something that is just functional enough to determine if its feasible or if it would properly meet the customers needs before then taking the time to build it correctly would resulted in a lot of saved time and money.
I wonder if the Unix philosophy of small apps will eventually further the capabilities of AI in regards to app development. If these AI could be used contribute to a shared library of small apps, then maybe that library could be used to iteratively build more and more capable apps. Shoulders of giants and all that.
That would certainly be preferable to the flood of AI-fueled monoliths predicted by this author. But maybe I'm being too optimistic.
How it normally works is that founders sell their vision to VC's (if they go that route). I guess there are crypto people who want a piece of that now? But they don't want any actual stake in a business, they just want their crypto coin to be magically connected to it somehow, hopefully with some encouragement that is at least adjacent to shilling.
Founding startups is about making money, but I believe it's possible to be too cynical about that; it doesn't leave enough room for people who sincerely believe in the vision they're selling. It's possible to believe your own hype.
Though I won't discuss specifics here, I've personally witnessed several of these scams firsthand from the inside over the last 5 years, to the sum of ~1 billion dollars -- it's not a new phenomenon, but maybe it's going mainstream.
But I would argue this is as old as the tides, it's just been accelerated by:
1) effectively unregulated gambling in the form of crypto tokens,
2) AI acceleration that the average person is too uneducated (sorry, it's true) to understand or evaluate the capabilities of and
3) pervasive, high-speed unregulated social media that props up insane technological claims and often outright lies for financial gain -- at least long enough and loud enough until the dump
You won't believe the PR schemes that brilliant insiders cook on Telegram for gullible audiences on Twitter, but it's not my story to tell here.
The only reason this has come to software is that ai slop coding has advanced the point where people who have no clue what they are doing with computers but know how to hype up an audience have learned "one weird trick to optimize rugpulls", and normies haven't yet realized they are the suckers at the table (or they haven't lost enough money yet for the bandwagon to move on to the next scam).
All of this actually makes me very sad as a person who's been working in AI + crypto for the better part of a decade because I think the tech is cool. Alas, you cannot beat the capitalist machine or underestimate people's greed or what they will do when given anonymity and freedom from reprecussions.
Is it? I’ve been experimenting with Gas Town, I’ve learned a lot of new ideas about coding agent orchestration, I haven’t given Steve Yegge a dime or touched any crypto. How am I being scammed?
The article just seems like yet another “look at all the hype around AI coding agents! Since we know AI coding doesn’t work, they must be a scam!” but with a garnish of “crypto is involved in some ancillary way! So watch out!”
isn't this all kind of obvious? Why would a software tool need an associated token? If a developer asked for donations in almost any existing coin I could see it making sense. Especially if they aren't able to access traditional banking for some reason. But why would someone need to launch a coin as part of an AI agent orchestration project?
FWIW the creator of Clawd (now Molt) is staunchly anti-crypto and has been from the start.
Accusing him of a pump & dump or being in on the scam is really unfair imo, he's been working very hard (and publicly) on Clawd, and has visibly had to deal with a massive influx of attention / hype and a wave of crypto grifters trying to force unofficial tokens down his throat. It must be hugely stressful.
The Ralph & Gastown devs embraced (but did not create) associated crypto projects (Yegge later distanced himself after criticism). They made their software, it gained in popularity and crypto bros latched on of their own accord. It would be interesting to see how many highly principled hners here would turn down mid six figures being offered to them for a tweet or a post acknowledging a token..
As an aside: meme tokens are an attention economy mmog - you may not like the game, but I can assure you those who play it know the rules.
The “How it works” section is an absolute mess. Each bullet uses a different pronoun, so it’s not clear who the actors actually are and how this all fits together. How are the “crypto bros” who approach the “tech person” related to the “fame hungry tech bro” that vibe-coded the failed app?
I’m sure there’s a tremendous long tail of scam attempts these days, but I’d be surprised if crypto scams haven’t already seen their high watermark in terms of actual victims.
Leynos|1 month ago
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.
CuriouslyC|1 month ago
storystarling|1 month ago
order-matters|1 month ago
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?
noosphr|1 month ago
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.
leggerss|1 month ago
Haven't we learned by now that all crypto coins are pump-and-dump schemes? Unless you're HODLing BTC or whatever... (yes, I'm a huge crypto skeptic)
As for the actual software, why isn't it worth exploring how to better incorporate this current wave of AI into our lives? I've idly wondered what an "AI coding factory" would look like, and Gas Town is an interesting instantiation of the idea. I've also wondered how to best incorporate memory and personal knowledge into an agent that I can self-host. Clawdbot (now Molt?) is an interesting take. People exploring these ideas shouldn't be shot down.
What I fail to understand is why anybody would buy a coin attached to these projects: what are the buyers expecting to happen to the coin? Is this yet another instance of the greater fool theory[1] that we saw with NFTs?
I also fail to understand why the creators are getting involved. I guess the author is trying to answer that question. I'd like to think of a more charitable interpretation than reputation laundering, but I'm not sure what it is... I'm open to suggestions :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
bb88|1 month ago
"They drove a dump truck full of money up to my house, I’m not made of stone!"
justonceokay|1 month ago
Or in the future will we look at the current time as the Wild West, the time when software moved more swiftly than the law. Where oil was there for anyone with a big enough guns to protect it.
Maybe we will experience our own butlerian jihad and realize that the thinking machines were controlling us the whole time. We will look at TikTok how we now look at the proliferation of ether in the 1800s.
pjc50|1 month ago
GorbachevyChase|1 month ago
peacebeard|1 month ago
johnmaguire|1 month ago
bee_rider|1 month ago
sergiotapia|1 month ago
fooker|1 month ago
pianopatrick|1 month ago
bakugo|1 month ago
In the span of roughly 3 days, I went from never once having heard the terms "clawdbot" or "gas town" to seeing them brought up repeatedly throughout every single tech discussion space I frequent (with no real use cases ever brought up, of course, just vague claims it being the next big thing, I still have no idea what either of these things actually do).
This "clawdbot"'s github repository apparently went from 5k stars to 70k stars in the span of a week, according to the graph proudly displayed on the readme. And I'm supposed to believe these are 70k real people, not 70k bot accounts.
I think this is the final nail on the coffin for human-to-human communication on the internet. I'm just going to assume it's all bots now.
postalcoder|1 month ago
TSiege|1 month ago
_pdp_|1 month ago
This is obviously in a blip in the grand scheme of things but it is just an indication what all of these social media platforms are destined to become without some sort of intervention.
thehamkercat|1 month ago
esskay|1 month ago
My understanding it was a very quick rebrand due to Anthropic sending a takedown notice so theres still references to the old name.
mentalgear|1 month ago
RationPhantoms|1 month ago
It's just par for the course in our attention economy. Like another poster had said, quite a bit of this is just simple experimentation that occurs.
polishdude20|1 month ago
It did a really good job with some prompting for fixes along the way. Turns out, it's really hard to individually ID people who are basically wearing the same thing and with similar colors.
All that is to say, I used it for an hour to see if my idea would work and be feasible.
isk517|1 month ago
jg0r3|1 month ago
CivBase|1 month ago
That would certainly be preferable to the flood of AI-fueled monoliths predicted by this author. But maybe I'm being too optimistic.
keyle|1 month ago
r0b05|1 month ago
UltraSane|1 month ago
fooker|1 month ago
Most software is in this category, but now we are being honest about it and can make it without paying a team of four for a year.
skybrian|1 month ago
Founding startups is about making money, but I believe it's possible to be too cynical about that; it doesn't leave enough room for people who sincerely believe in the vision they're selling. It's possible to believe your own hype.
goinghjuk|1 month ago
askl|1 month ago
Havoc|1 month ago
Made it a bit more accessible certainly but the problem here lies squarely on the crypto side here in my mind.
avaer|1 month ago
But I would argue this is as old as the tides, it's just been accelerated by:
1) effectively unregulated gambling in the form of crypto tokens,
2) AI acceleration that the average person is too uneducated (sorry, it's true) to understand or evaluate the capabilities of and
3) pervasive, high-speed unregulated social media that props up insane technological claims and often outright lies for financial gain -- at least long enough and loud enough until the dump
You won't believe the PR schemes that brilliant insiders cook on Telegram for gullible audiences on Twitter, but it's not my story to tell here.
The only reason this has come to software is that ai slop coding has advanced the point where people who have no clue what they are doing with computers but know how to hype up an audience have learned "one weird trick to optimize rugpulls", and normies haven't yet realized they are the suckers at the table (or they haven't lost enough money yet for the bandwagon to move on to the next scam).
All of this actually makes me very sad as a person who's been working in AI + crypto for the better part of a decade because I think the tech is cool. Alas, you cannot beat the capitalist machine or underestimate people's greed or what they will do when given anonymity and freedom from reprecussions.
NickNaraghi|1 month ago
indigodaddy|1 month ago
Uehreka|1 month ago
The article just seems like yet another “look at all the hype around AI coding agents! Since we know AI coding doesn’t work, they must be a scam!” but with a garnish of “crypto is involved in some ancillary way! So watch out!”
sidewndr46|1 month ago
jacobedawson|1 month ago
Accusing him of a pump & dump or being in on the scam is really unfair imo, he's been working very hard (and publicly) on Clawd, and has visibly had to deal with a massive influx of attention / hype and a wave of crypto grifters trying to force unofficial tokens down his throat. It must be hugely stressful.
The Ralph & Gastown devs embraced (but did not create) associated crypto projects (Yegge later distanced himself after criticism). They made their software, it gained in popularity and crypto bros latched on of their own accord. It would be interesting to see how many highly principled hners here would turn down mid six figures being offered to them for a tweet or a post acknowledging a token..
As an aside: meme tokens are an attention economy mmog - you may not like the game, but I can assure you those who play it know the rules.
andersource|1 month ago
dasil003|1 month ago
I’m sure there’s a tremendous long tail of scam attempts these days, but I’d be surprised if crypto scams haven’t already seen their high watermark in terms of actual victims.
jerjerjer|1 month ago
NFT was the peak.
tasuki|1 month ago
Definitely not. Those people were already famous. And famous people turning their fame into cash has always been a thing.
Not that I condone...