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0 pointsSwellJoe2mo ago0 comments

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.

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aaa_aaa2mo ago· 3 in thread

I think his writing is a mix of word salad and eloquent bs.

tclancy2mo ago

It didn’t used to be. Back in the mid 2000s I basically designed our company’s tech interview process based on a few articles he’d written about how he was doing the same at Amazon. He was a must follow for me back in the salad days of RSS. When I saw the Gastown announcement I had trouble reconciling the author and the writing.

jakevoytko2mo ago

And even still, it’s hard to ignore him because he’ll still have some insight like “token efficiency is going to be the big thing we care about in the future,” which was a small section of one of his Gastown blogs. And after you’re done asking yourself if that means Gastown is performance art, or he just said that as a hedge against his “vomit tokens” approach so that he could say “look I knew it all along” when this is all proven to be misguided, you’ll start to mull on just the concept of “token efficiency” and realize “someone who can do work in 1/10th the tokens will be king.” I mean hell, Gastown preceded real support for multiagent orchestration in Claude and potentially nudged it along that path.

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SwellJoeOP2mo ago

It certainly is now, but it's also seemingly all written by LLMs now, as well. He wasn't always like this, though he has always been prone to exaggeration and simplification. He had a lot of solid insights, though, and I enjoyed reading him. Things change.

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