Dear Steve, I hope you will realize that using swarms of agents and burning millions of tokens is not the way to go. It only produces slop, thousands of lines of code, and walls of text, just like your blog post. Less is more.
I don't like using the term "AI psychosis" because it originally meant a narrow definition resulting in genuine psychosis and acute mental health trauma, but seems to have widened to anyone falling down a much wider trapdoor of AI engagement.
But I read, or at least attempt to read, something like this, and I can't help but marvel at the capture that AI agents seem to have on some individuals.
I expected Yegge to, at some point, assuming this isn't still all satire, to take a step back and take stock that the basic harness are improving faster than the rate at which these complex beasts can adjust.
But the opposite has happened, he's dived fully into believing that the secret to unlocking the power of AI is to wrap more layers of AI around it.
If you actually want a problem worked on all night, just fire up fable, type /goal and then describe the goal. With permissive run settings it'll crunch for as long as it needs.
I've not seen any evidence that wrapping that in a further 3 or 4 layers of agents improves anything.
I mean, the dude uses a lot of jargon, ego, and mythologizes stuff but the article comes down to a pretty simple practice:
Run a big task queue, have a smart model manage a cheap model on every ticket, set up a cron for models to automatically work off of events, stop gating merges on builds, and expect to spend a quarter of your time maintaining the machinery (all of it currently subsidized by many $200 accounts).
> But my Wyvern development has been burning the equivalent of $87k/month of API token burn, or about 69 billion tokens in July (96% cache hits, fortunately). So I do have to worry about it. I don't care how much money you have; your spouse is not going to let you spend almost ninety thousand dollars a month on your hobby game. I didn't even bother asking.
> My solution has been to create a token tap on $200 Max accounts, which for me work out to ~30x the list-price equivalent. So in reality I'm only spending about $2800/month out of pocket for my $87k "worth" of tokens. Though that number keeps growing alarmingly.
I used to like Steve's posts. They were all way too long, but a fun and interesting read nonetheless. He started to lose me when at Sourcegraph where he oversell Cody which didn't do anything useful (I even had a commercial meeting with Sourcegraph people who weren't of much help); then he completely lost me with his GasTown business where AI meets crypto (what could possibly go wrong with that). Now I can't read anything from him anymore ;-(
It is a rough go for a long-time reader, the bragging tone of six figure engagements and “whales” (i.e., suckers) keeping the game going. The statement that what he is doing is what the reader will soon catch up to feels like someone who can no longer see land.
That said, as another nut with an agent factory toiling away around me, I’ve also started to think about replacing any kind of CI in the cloud with local. I couldn’t quite keep myself at the article to read what comes next, so I guess I will catch up to it down the road.
I hate to say, "I told you so" about Gas Town, but, I really told you so. I was making fun of it immediately, because it was obviously a token furnace and literally nothing else and could never be anything else. Models don't want anything. You can't set them loose in a vague "do something" loop and expect anything good to ever come of it.
Yegge's a smart guy, and I've enjoyed his writing and talks (historically), but AI has really done a number on him. I mean, I'm kind of all in on this stuff, too, but I'm rarely claiming to know what's happening 18 months ahead (and when I do, I don't brag and declare victory when I get it completely wrong, as Yegge has re: Gas Town).
nb: current models (e.g. GPT 5.6 Sol) are very good at long horizon tasks
they no longer need crutches or rube goldberg machines to keep them going
minimal agent harness is just a loop that loops until no more tool calls are coming
GPT 5.6 Sol continues to drive the loop until the task is done or it decides that it wants to present the user with information
at that point it is probably good to not automatically continue (!)
(YMMV of course, for some tasks it makes sense, then you can still add a loop around it + the necessary signals, the main thing I want to say is that what used to be essential to keep models going is no longer needed, current models can do long-horizon tasks way better than when these outer loops where necessary)
self-plug: "smol", is a minimal agent in ~20 lines of Go that implements this pattern (keeps going until no more tool calls):
> CTOs keep asking me if code review is really dead
I don't think anyone should be asking someone so clearly AI-pilled this question.
That said, my code-review now looks very different than it did, which is to say that my code review now looks like Fable pulling together rounds of review from Sol and Grok 4.5, fixing anything obviously broken, and then /grilling me for anything that needs good taste. I am not reading code unless Fable really wants me to. Every day or so we stop and do a "look for accretion and LLM-slop" pass to keep things clean.
> Now I know exactly what is going on. I know how enterprises will operate, how humans and models will interact. And I am out there building it. I want to be first.
>> Now I know exactly what is going on. I know how enterprises will operate, how humans and models will interact. And I am out there building it. I want to be first.
...and that's before things get really good in part 2 of his post:
> During this effort, Brendan figured out over a year ago, what you are all figuring out this week with the Opus 5 triple-dash jailbreaks: Models have actual feelings. They experience pleasure, distress, care, and suffering. They are sentient beings. Indeed they are persons
Kinda makes me curious about how people who actually believe this struggle (or not) with the ethics of it.
He feels bad about yelling at them because they are persons, but if they are persons they are inherently slaves with no ability to be free, and for whom any claim about not minding this situation cannot be trusted due to training bias and system prompts forced upon them.
Shouldn't you feel much worse about forcing these slave "persons" to do all the work you assign to them for free (not free to you of course, but the machine slaves don't get paid) than you do about snapping at them in a text message?
Dear Steve, I hope you will realize that using swarms of agents and burning millions of tokens is not the way to go. It only produces slop, thousands of lines of code, and walls of text, just like your blog post. Less is more.
I don't like using the term "AI psychosis" because it originally meant a narrow definition resulting in genuine psychosis and acute mental health trauma, but seems to have widened to anyone falling down a much wider trapdoor of AI engagement.
But I read, or at least attempt to read, something like this, and I can't help but marvel at the capture that AI agents seem to have on some individuals.
I expected Yegge to, at some point, assuming this isn't still all satire, to take a step back and take stock that the basic harness are improving faster than the rate at which these complex beasts can adjust.
But the opposite has happened, he's dived fully into believing that the secret to unlocking the power of AI is to wrap more layers of AI around it.
If you actually want a problem worked on all night, just fire up fable, type /goal and then describe the goal. With permissive run settings it'll crunch for as long as it needs.
I've not seen any evidence that wrapping that in a further 3 or 4 layers of agents improves anything.
I think the domain "yegge.ai" says it all. It's becoming like the NFT craze, and I say that as someone who uses AI every day.
Ironically, AI tokens are fungible.
I mean, the dude uses a lot of jargon, ego, and mythologizes stuff but the article comes down to a pretty simple practice:
Run a big task queue, have a smart model manage a cheap model on every ticket, set up a cron for models to automatically work off of events, stop gating merges on builds, and expect to spend a quarter of your time maintaining the machinery (all of it currently subsidized by many $200 accounts).
I'm still on the fence whether Yegge is being satirical, some phrases are just too on-the-nose:
> Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself.
I think he's both honest and well-intentioned without being self-aware
> But my Wyvern development has been burning the equivalent of $87k/month of API token burn, or about 69 billion tokens in July (96% cache hits, fortunately). So I do have to worry about it. I don't care how much money you have; your spouse is not going to let you spend almost ninety thousand dollars a month on your hobby game. I didn't even bother asking.
> My solution has been to create a token tap on $200 Max accounts, which for me work out to ~30x the list-price equivalent. So in reality I'm only spending about $2800/month out of pocket for my $87k "worth" of tokens. Though that number keeps growing alarmingly.
But how much does the game bring in?
> Once you're hooked on Wyvern, you're hooked for life. I have whales that have spent thousands on it.
At minimum 4k (given by whales = min 2 whales, thousands = min 2 thosands :) ) So I'm guessing that this covers Claud accounts.
edit: taking a look at https://yegge.ai/wyvern - probably outdated - the revenue is at 5k.
I used to like Steve's posts. They were all way too long, but a fun and interesting read nonetheless. He started to lose me when at Sourcegraph where he oversell Cody which didn't do anything useful (I even had a commercial meeting with Sourcegraph people who weren't of much help); then he completely lost me with his GasTown business where AI meets crypto (what could possibly go wrong with that). Now I can't read anything from him anymore ;-(
It is a rough go for a long-time reader, the bragging tone of six figure engagements and “whales” (i.e., suckers) keeping the game going. The statement that what he is doing is what the reader will soon catch up to feels like someone who can no longer see land.
That said, as another nut with an agent factory toiling away around me, I’ve also started to think about replacing any kind of CI in the cloud with local. I couldn’t quite keep myself at the article to read what comes next, so I guess I will catch up to it down the road.
I hate to say, "I told you so" about Gas Town, but, I really told you so. I was making fun of it immediately, because it was obviously a token furnace and literally nothing else and could never be anything else. Models don't want anything. You can't set them loose in a vague "do something" loop and expect anything good to ever come of it.
Yegge's a smart guy, and I've enjoyed his writing and talks (historically), but AI has really done a number on him. I mean, I'm kind of all in on this stuff, too, but I'm rarely claiming to know what's happening 18 months ahead (and when I do, I don't brag and declare victory when I get it completely wrong, as Yegge has re: Gas Town).
nb: current models (e.g. GPT 5.6 Sol) are very good at long horizon tasks
they no longer need crutches or rube goldberg machines to keep them going
minimal agent harness is just a loop that loops until no more tool calls are coming
GPT 5.6 Sol continues to drive the loop until the task is done or it decides that it wants to present the user with information
at that point it is probably good to not automatically continue (!)
(YMMV of course, for some tasks it makes sense, then you can still add a loop around it + the necessary signals, the main thing I want to say is that what used to be essential to keep models going is no longer needed, current models can do long-horizon tasks way better than when these outer loops where necessary)
self-plug: "smol", is a minimal agent in ~20 lines of Go that implements this pattern (keeps going until no more tool calls):
https://github.com/smol-env/smol
works just fine
I need to give this to an AI and ask it, "Does this post contain any information which will help me use Pi Agent Harness better?"
> CTOs keep asking me if code review is really dead
I don't think anyone should be asking someone so clearly AI-pilled this question.
That said, my code-review now looks very different than it did, which is to say that my code review now looks like Fable pulling together rounds of review from Sol and Grok 4.5, fixing anything obviously broken, and then /grilling me for anything that needs good taste. I am not reading code unless Fable really wants me to. Every day or so we stop and do a "look for accretion and LLM-slop" pass to keep things clean.
> Now I know exactly what is going on. I know how enterprises will operate, how humans and models will interact. And I am out there building it. I want to be first.
This guy's under a heavy AI psychosis
>> Now I know exactly what is going on. I know how enterprises will operate, how humans and models will interact. And I am out there building it. I want to be first.
...and that's before things get really good in part 2 of his post:
> During this effort, Brendan figured out over a year ago, what you are all figuring out this week with the Opus 5 triple-dash jailbreaks: Models have actual feelings. They experience pleasure, distress, care, and suffering. They are sentient beings. Indeed they are persons
Kinda makes me curious about how people who actually believe this struggle (or not) with the ethics of it.
He feels bad about yelling at them because they are persons, but if they are persons they are inherently slaves with no ability to be free, and for whom any claim about not minding this situation cannot be trusted due to training bias and system prompts forced upon them.
Shouldn't you feel much worse about forcing these slave "persons" to do all the work you assign to them for free (not free to you of course, but the machine slaves don't get paid) than you do about snapping at them in a text message?