With LLM-based tools that inherently rely so much on the semantics of language, I wonder if there will be differences in code generated for the "wanted board" in the "Wasteland", compared to the "task list" in the "public square" or the "wish list" in the "Utopia".
I really want to host a vibe coding competition and see what can actually be made with these systems. Like if we’re doing insane token spends, it better be in service of creating amazing stuff. Can we make an entirely new programming language? Can we make an OS?
That would be awesome to see! If there was some prize pool like $5,000 to build an operating system through vibe coding tools only and then people could stream themselves on twitch and you could have "sorts desk" type commentators who are collating all that together. I'd watch that and donate a hundred bucks.
In all honesty, if you scoped this well, one of the big players in the LLM space could definitely host a big marketing event on this spin. Get together a bunch of well known industry folks, have them vibe code a working <thing> in a given time constraint, presentations and prizes, lots of marketing.
"We pay for 10000 AI bots and it makes awesome software, which is invisible and undetectable by anybody except me. It gives me a sense of pride and accomplishment."
> The Wasteland is a way to link thousands of Gas Towns together (...) to build stuff really, really fast. So fast that your biggest problem will be ideas.
This reads like a speech from Pete Hegseth.
"Let's do war! Hard! Let's build stuff! Stat!"
Build what? Fight for what?
"The hell if we know! Just get busy dropping bombs, or "stamps" or whatever! Faster!"
In the end, all that's left is, indeed, a wasteland.
What's the incentive for anyone to participate in this? It seems wildly expensive (in tokens), high mental overhead to understand, high hardware cost. So what's the upside?
Is it for people with too much money and time on their hands to flex on Github?
I could at least understand the pitch if there was a crypto scam attached, or if folks were getting paid somehow (which might be an interesting social/AI experiment). But that doesn't seem to be the case.
It's interesting progression from Gas Town, but it seems like the bottleneck is still translating ideas into actionable input/output frameworks for various agentic tasks.
Also there's the issue of how to identify systems-interface problems and posting those tasks for completion as well. No guarantee that a totally federated system will not solve interfacial issues faster than they generate them without feedback and oversight.
AI got to him awhile ago, I'm afraid. Been telling stories about these gastowns, zero code review and thousands of lines of code and thousands of dollars in burned tokens since last year.
This is a classic example of a 'Solution in Search of a Metaphor.'
Strip away the 5,000 words of Fury Road fan fiction and you’re left with a multi-agent wrapper for Claude Code that effectively automates the generation of technical debt. It feels like Yegge is trying to brand 'shoveling tokens into a furnace' as a new paradigm, but the cognitive overhead of learning his proprietary 'lore' just to manage a tmux session of LLMs is a massive net loss in productivity.
We don't need a Wasteland; we need tools that actually improve the signal-to-noise ratio, not industrial-scale noise generators.
I think this is part of the point, perhaps? I get strong Urbit vibes from the Gastown fanfic. Take a relatively simple concept, but invent an entirely new vocabulary to describe it. It satisfies the creator's ego, and acts as a filter for non-believers. People need to buy in to the creator's vision and commit to learning the lingo in order to engage. People who don't get dismissed as lacking the capacity to understand. In other words, cult behavior.
Every Yegge post about AI reads like a Music Man style con job, but he’s got Silicon Valley startup founders salivating and pushing his book to their employees.
I mean no personal attack or animus whatsoever toward Steve, but this whole episode reads like a nihilistic accelerationist manic episode. If that's the case, I totally get it; regardless of the technological merit of LLMs, and in the current political moment, the hype feels unprecedented in its intensity and magnitude.
Reads like a scam. Obfuscatory language, outsized claims on future impact, excited opportunity advertisement, first-mover advantage, "no time for the rulebook, it's an inch thick!".
Hilarious too that he uses the word "wasteland" for something that's supposedly good. Perhaps it is a double coding where all of us normies mock it but the FOMO-blinded have their own private reading and say the rest of us are totally wrong.
Reminds me of those 419 emails where the grammar is bad, the story makes no sense, but hey there really are people who expect $10 million to fall out of the sky because they already had $10 million fall out of the sky on them.
Waste… I can’t stop thinking about the waste of human talent and potential. The waste of resources to run AI data centers. The waste of the now old school CS ethos. Yea, wasteland checks out.
People should stop giving Steve Yegge as much attention as they do.
It's slop on top of slop on top of slop. It's not even quality slop. Apart from bloviated self-aggrandising blog posts, the ideas are trivial, and the execution is beyond horrendous.
Look beyond the ChatGPT-generated terminology to see the supervisors, loops and worker processes of Gas Town. Now it's a freelance board with AI agents as freelancers. But sure, polecats, mayors, stamps and character sheets. Whatever floats your upcoming crypto rug pull [1].
This is what he writes: "build stuff really, really fast. So fast that your biggest problem will be ideas." We've yet to see ideas built using the slopcoded monstrosities.
I have seen both of these already. I've done the former personally, and I've seen links to at least kernels for the latter.
(I didn't do it via gastown, just regular old "use Claude".)
This is trivial in a few hours with Claude Code
Yegge's Medium uses a serif font so you can tell, but in many faces you can't.
(We still get this comment constantly and it's very unfortunate)
https://www.dolthub.com/
This reads like a speech from Pete Hegseth.
"Let's do war! Hard! Let's build stuff! Stat!"
Build what? Fight for what?
"The hell if we know! Just get busy dropping bombs, or "stamps" or whatever! Faster!"
In the end, all that's left is, indeed, a wasteland.
Is it for people with too much money and time on their hands to flex on Github?
I could at least understand the pitch if there was a crypto scam attached, or if folks were getting paid somehow (which might be an interesting social/AI experiment). But that doesn't seem to be the case.
Also there's the issue of how to identify systems-interface problems and posting those tasks for completion as well. No guarantee that a totally federated system will not solve interfacial issues faster than they generate them without feedback and oversight.
All I can take from this is that you must spend more tokens.
I'm good, thanks.
Reminds me of those 419 emails where the grammar is bad, the story makes no sense, but hey there really are people who expect $10 million to fall out of the sky because they already had $10 million fall out of the sky on them.
This is all just performance art at this point, right?
I've not seen anyone take Gas Town seriously or even semi-seriously in the way people take Openclaw semi-seriously.
Gas Town certainly seems like a concept for performance art. The original blog post read like it, and so does this.
It's slop on top of slop on top of slop. It's not even quality slop. Apart from bloviated self-aggrandising blog posts, the ideas are trivial, and the execution is beyond horrendous.
Look beyond the ChatGPT-generated terminology to see the supervisors, loops and worker processes of Gas Town. Now it's a freelance board with AI agents as freelancers. But sure, polecats, mayors, stamps and character sheets. Whatever floats your upcoming crypto rug pull [1].
This is what he writes: "build stuff really, really fast. So fast that your biggest problem will be ideas." We've yet to see ideas built using the slopcoded monstrosities.
[1] https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vib...