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.
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.
> The supervisor-worker architecture is standard for distributed systems, but I'm not sure the unit economics make sense yet. ... [T]hat specific pattern seems significantly more expensive and slower than a human developer.
Yeggie very explicitly states that Gas Town is for people who give zero shits about how much money they're forking over to their LLM company. If I remember correctly, he said that he had to get a second entire account because of how much money he was spending.
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 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.
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.
The Vernor Vinge SF novels have the profession of "software archaeologist", someone who digs through the layers of systems in order to extract understanding.
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.
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.
molt.bot is connected to the same spam network - growing number of backlinks and reddit shilling just in the past 24 hours.
I saw at least 2-3 security reports as well pointing to various critical vulnerability.
Looked at the source as well - it makes zero sense. A lot of random commits. I suspect it would be trivial to introduce a backdoor the way this project is managed.
I would likely not touch the product because of the implications of providing an LLM full system access. With the pump-and-dump coin chumps, it's possible they use the carapace of software as a hype-vehicle with no relation to the dev.
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).
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here's a counterthesis:
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.
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.
They don't make sense yet. It works out very expensive at present. Far too expensive to run as anything other than an experiment.
> The supervisor-worker architecture is standard for distributed systems, but I'm not sure the unit economics make sense yet. ... [T]hat specific pattern seems significantly more expensive and slower than a human developer.
Yeggie very explicitly states that Gas Town is for people who give zero shits about how much money they're forking over to their LLM company. If I remember correctly, he said that he had to get a second entire account because of how much money he was spending.
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.
is it not also one of the most logical approaches to experiment with first? it's loosely how I've been working with agents as well.
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?
Crypto scams sucked before vibe coding and sucked after vibe coding.
Made it a bit more accessible certainly but the problem here lies squarely on the crypto side here in my mind.
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.
Put on my gravestone “I Was An Internet Cowboy”
Is that like a rhinestone cowboy?
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 will all be written from scratch in binary.
The Vernor Vinge SF novels have the profession of "software archaeologist", someone who digs through the layers of systems in order to extract understanding.
It’s me.
The future hopefully is more Star Trek, where we go "Computer, x y z" and it just happens.
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.
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.
I did an analysis myself yesterday and commented about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46760930
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.
molt.bot is connected to the same spam network - growing number of backlinks and reddit shilling just in the past 24 hours.
I saw at least 2-3 security reports as well pointing to various critical vulnerability.
Looked at the source as well - it makes zero sense. A lot of random commits. I suspect it would be trivial to introduce a backdoor the way this project is managed.
Too many red flags.
I would personally not touch this project.
I would likely not touch the product because of the implications of providing an LLM full system access. With the pump-and-dump coin chumps, it's possible they use the carapace of software as a hype-vehicle with no relation to the dev.
Would you be willing to share these links? ROT13 or base64 encode the URLs.
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).
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.
I think this is the same phenomenon as the author describes, but on a smaller scale
Maybe there should be a term for when an industry is at its wits ends so far gone that crypto scams are viable.
Wonder if we'll get a response from Yegge or clawdbot creator (either here or as a blog post). This is a fairly damning indictment.
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!”
Well, accusation then, not indictment
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.
Matt Levine explained this innovation in founding beautifully: we give you money, and you give us... nothing (0% stake)
So true. VC startups are the original pump and dump software. The dump is just called "successful exit".
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.
"a schizoprenic vibe coded fever dream " Is a very accurate description of gas town
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.
pumpndumpware. catchy
> This is how it works: Fame hungry tech bro
Definitely not. Those people were already famous. And famous people turning their fame into cash has always been a thing.
Not that I condone...
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.