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
They 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.
> Gas Town “just works.” It does its job, it has tons of integration points, and it has been stable for many weeks. People are using it to build real stuff.
> So as far as I’m concerned, Gas Town is ready. That’s why I feel it merits a 1.0.0 release.
Source: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/gas-town-from-clown-show-to-v...
The neat part though, is agents are so interwoven through its operations, it can kind of power through almost any error. It's a strange-but-real form of resilience.
Actual laugh out loud. 3 months[1].
Imagine picking up software that 3 months ago came along with the disclaimer, "YOU WILL DIE" and complaining about responsible disclosure.
1 https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
Accidentally leave a browser tab open and it burns $5 of your electricity overnight to make $2 for the owner of the website.
(btw that was a really good showcase for WebAssembly. Too bad it's used for illegitimate purposes)
Google Meet consumes 25% of each of 16 hypercores, ffs. On a 7840u. Laptop becomes a toaster.
It's a shame in a way, it also blocked the pseudo-captchas that used mining to limit spam.
> WARNING DANGER CAUTION > GET THE F* OUT > YOU WILL DIE
You cannot be serious...This behaviour is deeply unethical and most likely illegal as well.
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 CAUTION
GET THE F** OUT
YOU WILL DIE
Let’s talk about some of the reasons you shouldn’t use Gas Town. I could think of more, but these should do.”
> vibe coding on a serious level
I hope your experience with the book has taught you a valuable lesson about "vibe coding", it seems like it was unintentionally very accurate.
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.
To answer your question, no. I'm growing deeply suspicious of outright vibe coding as a practice. We still need to figure out the tools and process, so experimentation is pretty much where we're still at.
> It was a slop how-to book
So, it did.
The outcome will be similar.
This judgement feels premature.
We really don't have any idea what is possible. The wheels within wheels, epicycles within epicycles model of agentic loops hasn't really been deeply explored and we just don't know where they might go.
I too share your instinct that human steering helps, helps a lot. But I've found I can keep using less of it, as I setup better parameters, as I improve conducing the LLM into good paths. The idea that an LLM could sit up top and help try not one idea at a time but try many things, then pick and cobble together next goes: that is madly madly madly exciting to me.
I don't want to keep being the bandwidth limiter in this system: I want to scale out. I haven't been following close or trying but I tend to think while total hands off is not the way, having LLMs that can cover a lot of terrain, explore a lot of solution spaces and directions, then assess how to put it together & what to take forward, and other practices of agents watching agents, has enormous potential.
Deliberate care relies on pre-obtained wisdom, and often, the human biases kind of suck and aren't they good. We aren't great at burning down our systems enough, at Chad Fowler Phoenix Architectures. I think the AI's lack of over deliberation and it's ability to try vastly more could be a huge advantage, could show diversity triumphing over specific crafted intent.
For open source you get what you get and you don’t get upset. Has anyone ever sued an open source project?
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.
It's industry-relevant. This is what the industry is now. All in two short years.
> he keeps on being very vocal about his shit show?
I'm not really sure what this complaint is. You want someone doing something to not.... write a blog about it?
> Because it’s annoying to have to see yet another delusional vibe coded project being hyped up instead of this forum being used to discuss actually industry relevant information?
I think I've seen around 2 posts, one the original gastown one and then the gascity one. Is two posts in like a year too much or do I miss a midday rush where the front page is all Yegge?
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.
- https://github.com/gastownhall/gastown/blob/main/internal/fo...
(Edit, thanks MisterTea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770805)
That is a very 2025 mindset
That said... someone could also have their agents rip out this code or disable the functionality, so I doubt this is a serious inconvenience.
You want to fatten the oligarchs by pretending this is open source and steal money from users?
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.
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.
That is clearly the fault of the clankers that produced this crap, so their providers are responsible.
And despite my disdain for AI companies, I'd prefer a world where you're assumed to be aware of the dangers of using AI, and responsible for how recklessly you use it, to one where we pretend that they'll ever be reliable enough.
Of course the AI companies are responsible for what they say; if they claimed that you don't need to carefully inspect the output of their clankers, they sure hold part of the responsibility.
The “thoughtless design vs. malice” framing by Anthropic is generous. Shipping formulas that target steveyegge/gastown issues is intentional. Someone wrote those formulas, pointed them at the maintainer’s repo, and included them in the default install. Someone thought it was acceptable I guess because it’s open source?
I know I should not be surprised at this point, yet they keep reaching new lows.
"I've never used Gas Town, but I'm mad that there are people who like something I don't like."
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.
This is like when someone torrents and is immediately agro'd the moment your bittorrent client gives some poor passerby a kb of data
how could this be prevented?
Sounds like a techbro.
Edit: Apparently so: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vib...
You can't take someone's money and then not only not give it back, but also give it away.
Also, it's cryptocurrency. There is literally no burden to prove that this money was donated, or what "charity" even means in this context.
I'm not accusing him of doing anything wrong as he didn't originate the coin, but his original disclosure messaging on the situation was pretty horrible which is why it harmed his reputation.
The sad thing is that it often works.
Just look at how people view Andrew Carnegie now. After his reputation was sullied by his company’s behavior in the Homestead Strike, his philanthropy was done, in-part, to try and restore his reputation.
> But for God's sake, don't accuse me of pumping it.
His "apology" would be more effective without including all the whining about accurately describing the sequence of events he voluntarily participated it for personal gain.
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-...
This is not to excuse the scummy behavior. I didn’t know Steve Yegge went this low just to make a quick buck, and I lost almost all respect for him.