Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Last substack for 2025 - may 2026 bring better tidings. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    3 days ago

    Steve Yegge has created Gas Town, a mess of Claude Code agents forced to cosplay as a k8s cluster with a Mad Max theme. I can’t think of better sneers than Yegge’s own commentary:

    Gas Town is also expensive as hell. You won’t like Gas Town if you ever have to think, even for a moment, about where money comes from. I had to get my second Claude Code account, finally; they don’t let you siphon unlimited dollars from a single account, so you need multiple emails and siphons, it’s all very silly. My calculations show that now that Gas Town has finally achieved liftoff, I will need a third Claude Code account by the end of next week. It is a cash guzzler.

    If you’re familiar with the Towers-of-Hanoi problem then you can appreciate the contrast between Yegge’s solution and a standard solution; in general, recursive solutions are fewer than ten lines of code.

    Gas Town solves the MAKER problem (20-disc Hanoi towers) trivially with a million-step wisp you can generate from a formula. I ran the 10-disc one last night for fun in a few minutes, just to prove a thousand steps was no issue (MAKER paper says LLMs fail after a few hundred). The 20-disc wisp would take about 30 hours.

    For comparison, solving for 20 discs in the famously-slow CPython programming system takes less than a second, with most time spent printing lines to the console. The solution length is exponential in the number of discs, and that’s over one million lines total. At thirty hours, Yegge’s harness solves Hanoi at fewer than ten lines/second! Also I can’t help but notice that he didn’t verify the correctness of the solution; by “run” he means that he got an LLM to print out a solution-shaped line.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      Fantastic bit. I wonder if the Computer History Museum will eventually be able to replicate this as the peak of the “gen-AI” era.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      Working effectively in Gas Town involves committing to vibe coding. Work becomes fluid, an uncountable that you sling around freely, like slopping shiny fish into wooden barrels at the docks. Most work gets done; some work gets lost. Fish fall out of the barrel. Some escape back to sea, or get stepped on. More fish will come

      Oh. Oh no.

      First came Beads. In October, I told Claude in frustration to put all my work in a lightweight issue tracker. I wanted Git for it. Claude wanted SQLite. We compromised on both, and Beads was born, in about 15 minutes of mad design. These are the basic work units.

      I don’t think I could come up with a better satire of vibe coding and yet here we fucking are. This comes after several pages of explaining the 3 or 4 different hacks responsible for making the agents actually do something when they start up, which I’m pretty sure could be replaced by bit of actual debugging but nope we’re vibe coding now.

      Look, I’ve talked before about how I don’t have a lot of experience with software engineering, and please correct me if I’m wrong. But this doesn’t look like an engineered project. It looks like a pile of piles of random shit that he kept throwing back to Claude code until it looked like it did what he wanted.

    • x0rcist@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      3 days ago
      1. Please god let this be a joke. (I know its not)
      2. Do we know what the limit he’s talking about hitting with Anthropic is? Like, how many hundreds of thousands of dollars has this man set on fire in the past two weeks such that Anthropic went “whoa buddy, slow down”
    • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      3 days ago

      That’s horrifying. The whole thing reads like an over-elaborate joke poking fun at vibe-coders.

      It’s like someone looked at the javascript ecosystem of tools and libraries and thought that it was great but far too conservative and cautious and excessively engineered. (fwiw, yegge kinda predicted the rise of javascript back in the day… he’s had some good thoughts on the software industry, but I don’t think this latest is one of them)

      So now we have some kind of meta-vibe-coding where someone gets to play at being a project manager whilst inventing cutesy names and torching huge sums of money… but to what end?

      Aside from just keeping Gas Town on the rails, probably the hardest problem is keeping it fed. It churns through implementation plans so quickly that you have to do a LOT of design and planning to keep the engine fed.

      Apart from a “haha, turns out vide coding isn’t vibe engineering” (because I suspect that “design” and “plan” just mean “write more prompts and hope for the best”) I have to ask again: to what end? what is being accomplished here? Where are the great works of agentic vibe coding? This whole thing just seems like it could have been avoided by giving steve a copy of factorio or something, and still generated as many valuable results.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      Also I can’t help but notice that he didn’t verify the correctness of the solution

      Think I have mentioned the story I heard here once, about the guy who wrote a program to find some large prime which he ran on the mainframe over the weekend, using up all the calculation budget his uni department had. And then they confronted him with the end result, and the number the program produced ended in a 2. (He had forgotten to code the -1 step).

      This reminded me of that story. (At least in this case it actually produced a viable result (if costly), just with a minor error).

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        1 day ago

        It’s okay, he definitely wants to verify it but actually confirming that this whole disaster pile worked as intended and produced usable code apparently didn’t make the cut.

        Federation — even Python Gas Town had support for remote workers on GCP. I need to design the support for federation, both for expanding your own town’s capacity, and for linking and sharing work with other human towns.

        GUI — I didn’t even have time to make an Emacs UI, let alone a nice web UI. But someone should totally make one, and if not, I’ll get around to it eventually.

        Plugins — I didn’t get a chance to implement any functionality as plugins on molecule steps, but all the infrastructure is in place.

        The Mol Mall — a marketplace and exchange for molecules that define and shape workloads.

        Hanoi/MAKER — I wanted to run the million-step wisp but ran out of time.

        Also worth noting that in the jargon he’s created for this, a “wisp” is ephemeral rather than a proper output, so it seems like he may have pulled this solution out of the middle of a running attempt to calculate the solution and assumed that it was absolutely correct despite repeatedly saying throughout his writeup here that there’s no guarantee that any given internal step is the right answer. This guy strikes me as very good at branding but not really much else.