Still thinking about https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/agent-psychosis/

Good summary.

Upshot: Steve thinks he’s built a quality task tracker/work system (beads), and is iterating on architectures, and has gotten convinced an architecture-builder is going to make sense.

Meanwhile, work output is going to improve independently. The bet is that leverage on the top side is going to be the key factor.

To co-believe this with Steve, you have to believe that workers can self-stabilize (e.g. with something like the Wiggum loop you can get some actual quality out of them, unsupervised by a human), and that their coordinators can self stabilize.

If you believe those to be true, then you’re going to be eyeing 100-1000x productivity just because you get to multiply 10 coordinators by 10 workers.

I’ll say that I’m generally bought in to this math. Anecdotally I currently (last 2 months) spend about half my coding agent time asking for easy in-roads to what’s been done; a year ago, I spent 10% specifying and 90% complaining about bugs.

Example, I just pulled up an old project, and asked for a status report — I got a status report based on existing beads. I asked it to verify, and the computer ran the program and reported a fairly high quality status report. I then asked it to read the output (a PDF), and it read the PDF, noticed my main complaints, and issued 20 or so beads to get things in the right shape. I had no real complaints about the response or workplan.

I haven’t said “go” yet, but I presume when I do, I’m going to be basically checking work, and encouraging that work checking I’m doing to get automated as well.

There’s a sort of not-obvious thing that happens as we move from 0.5 9s to say 3 9s in terms of effectiveness — we’re going to go from constant intervention needed at one order of magnitude of work to constant intervention needed at 2.5x that order of magnitude of work — it’s a little hard to believe unless you’ve really poked around — but I think it’s coming pretty soon, as does Steve.

Who, nota bene, to be clear, is working at a pace that he is turning down 20 VCs a week, selling memecoin earnings in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and randomly ‘napping’ in the middle of the day. Stay rested Steve, keep on this side of the manic curve please, we need you.. I’d say it’s a good sign he didn’t buy any GAS token himself.

I spent some time reading about Gas Town to see if I could understand what Stevey was trying to accomplish. I think he has some good ideas in there, actually - it really does seem like he's thought a bit about what coding in the future might look like. Unfortunately, it's so full of esoteric language and vibecoded READMEs that it is quite difficult to get into. The most concerning thing is that Stevey seems totally unaware of this. He writes about how when he tried to explain this to people they just stared at him like they were idiots, and so they must all be wrong -- that's a bit worrying, from a health and psychosis angle.

I instantly read any Steve Yegge blog. Not true of anyone else.

Every time I read another article from this guy I get even more frustrated telling if he’s grifting or legitimately insane

Between quotes like these

> I had lunch again (Kirkland Cactus) with my buddies Ajit Banerjee and Ryan Snodgrass, the ones who have been chastising teammates for acting on ancient 2-hour-old information.

, and trying to argue that this is the future of all productivity while taking time to physically go to a bank to get money off a crypto coin while also crowing about how he can’t waste time on money.

On top of that this entire gas town thing is predicated on not caring about the cost but AI firms are currently burning money as fast as possible selling a dollar for 10 cents. How does the entire framework/technique not crash and burn the second infinite investment stops and the AI companies need to be profitable and not a money hole?

“I’m going to go lay down and, uh, think about the problem with my eyes closed”

Oh good, mainstream coders finally catching up with the productivity of 2010s Clojurists and their “Hammock Driven Development”! (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc)

I think there's an interesting idea behind Gas Town (basically, using supervisor trees to make agents reliable, analogous to how Erlang uses them to make processes reliable), but it's lacking a proper quality ratchet (agents often don't mind changing or deleting tests instead of fixing code) and architectural function (agents tend to reinvent the wheel over and over again, the context window simply isn't big enough to fit everything in).

However, Steve Yegge's recent credulous foray into promoting a crypto coin, which was (IMO) transparently leveraging his audience and buzz to execute a pump and dump scheme, with him being an unwitting collaborator, makes me think all is not necessarily well in Yegge land.

I think Steve needs to take a step back from his amazing productivity machine and have another look at that code, and consider if it's really production quality.