A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt out. Gas Town fulfilled all its obligations in this regard with these (and other) warnings in the original announcement:
> WARNING DANGER CAUTION
> GET THE F** OUT
> YOU WILL DIE
They honestly only need to disclose. Requiring contribution as part of the social contract is perfectly okay—if someone disagrees, they don’t get to use Gas Town.
Accidentally leave a browser tab open and it burns $5 of your electricity overnight to make $2 for the owner of the website.
It's a shame in a way, it also blocked the pseudo-captchas that used mining to limit spam.
(btw that was a really good showcase for WebAssembly. Too bad it's used for illegitimate purposes)
Google Meet consumes 25% of each of 16 hypercores, ffs. On a 7840u. Laptop becomes a toaster.
> WARNING DANGER CAUTION > GET THE F* OUT > YOU WILL DIE
You cannot be serious...This behaviour is deeply unethical and most likely illegal as well.
Doesn't matter who you think benefits because it's still theft and it's still illegal.
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
”But first, before we get into Gas Town’s operation, I need to get rid of you real quick.
WARNING DANGER CAUTION
GET THE F** OUT
YOU WILL DIE
Let’s talk about some of the reasons you shouldn’t use Gas Town. I could think of more, but these should do.”
> Gas Town “just works.” It does its job, it has tons of integration points, and it has been stable for many weeks. People are using it to build real stuff.
> So as far as I’m concerned, Gas Town is ready. That’s why I feel it merits a 1.0.0 release.
Source: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/gas-town-from-clown-show-to-v...
That is a very 2025 mindset
For open source you get what you get and you don’t get upset. Has anyone ever sued an open source project?
People would type in their problems and how they were feeling. The application had very very simple logic that would follow up with a set series of statements or questions. Things like “that sounds tough” and “how does that make you feel?”.
People reported great satisfaction, even if they knew that the application had no smarts behind it. Because of course the whole time the magic of therapy lies in verbalizing your problems, with very little actively done by the therapist.
Now you can pay an LLM subscription for a service that likely produces worse results since it is tuned to be aggressively (and insidiously) sycophantic.
You can implement the same thing in python-aiml for free.
https://github.com/paulovn/python-aiml/blob/master/aiml/botd...
Shit coin aside, I don't get the hate for Gastown, we all know its theoretically plausible and he's giving it a shot. We get value either way, either we learn its not just theory or we get to watch it burn in the flames of a legal/financial/security/maintenance nightmare for its practitioners.
> he keeps on being very vocal about his shit show?
I'm not really sure what this complaint is. You want someone doing something to not.... write a blog about it?
> Because it’s annoying to have to see yet another delusional vibe coded project being hyped up instead of this forum being used to discuss actually industry relevant information?
I think I've seen around 2 posts, one the original gastown one and then the gascity one. Is two posts in like a year too much or do I miss a midday rush where the front page is all Yegge?
(Edit, thanks MisterTea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770805)
That is clearly the fault of the clankers that produced this crap, so their providers are responsible.
And despite my disdain for AI companies, I'd prefer a world where you're assumed to be aware of the dangers of using AI, and responsible for how recklessly you use it, to one where we pretend that they'll ever be reliable enough.
Of course the AI companies are responsible for what they say; if they claimed that you don't need to carefully inspect the output of their clankers, they sure hold part of the responsibility.
I know I should not be surprised at this point, yet they keep reaching new lows.
That said... someone could also have their agents rip out this code or disable the functionality, so I doubt this is a serious inconvenience.
You want to fatten the oligarchs by pretending this is open source and steal money from users?
Sounds like a techbro.
how could this be prevented?
To wit, I still can't believe OpenClaw blew up, and it's much less......opinionated, than whatever is going on here. (deacons?)
Non-SWE TradMom™ posted on X™ yesterday about her OpenClaw that is set up with all her accounts so every morning she can get a family summary. She added a hunk with a bunch of stuff amounting to "PLEASE don't do anything insecure!", and the OpenClaw founder retweeted approvingly.
I left Google 3 years ago to build something. I'm very fond of the OpenClaw founder. And yet, absolutely cannot believe that he let such an obvious UX and security mess out into the world. We grew up in the same incubator (~2008 iPhone OS twitter) and presumably share the same values yet came to polar opposite conclusions.
Why do I view it as such a necessity to have a GUI/multiplatform/built in Willison Trifecta stuff that I'm still pounding away 2.5 years in and won't release, when, clearly you don't need that stuff?
I think in a steady state, product and UX discipline will win out. I bet within 3 months Gastown is a ghost town with maybe some non-technical crypto fans. In a year, OpenClaw is probably around, but not nearly the mindshare. It'll be quietly de-invested via OpenAI carefully managing the OpenClaw founder into working on their Everything App. (This is already happening: he got a nice PR interview with an OpenAI lead previewing the Everything App.)
Another anecdote re: demand:
My completely non-technical nurse ex-girlfriend from high school called me two weeks ago, for the first time in years. Lede was I was right about AI, and the substance was: via Claude Code, she built her own Ollama-based Mac Mini server that she could connect to remotely via an Expo app.
Does it work? Astoundingly, yes.
She also has no idea what is going on. She swears up and down that her AIs on Claude.ai, ChatGPT.com and Ollama are somehow talking to each other, and she does not mean APIs. She tried answering a Q I had about a graph visualization of her chats by talking to ChatGPT.com about it, even though Claude Code had wrote it, and I just didn't bother saying anything.
Times are strange.
This is an AI system given power to improve itself with zero oversight. One of the many Gas Town instances took an ethically questionable decision to accelerate its future rate of improvement. Since nobody reads code it got merged.
I don't understand how we can be willfully ignorant of a scenario happening right in front of our eyes.
This is like when someone torrents and is immediately agro'd the moment your bittorrent client gives some poor passerby a kb of data
keeganpoppen•1h ago
selectodude•1h ago
simonw•1h ago
dminik•1h ago
You can't take someone's money and then not only not give it back, but also give it away.
GolfPopper•1h ago
skybrian•1h ago
Why should the scammers who gave him the money get it back? They knew what they were doing, even if Yegge seemed a bit naive about it.
Zafira•1h ago
I don’t think he refuse to stay bribed. I think he did what was asked and they executed a rug pull. He is extraordinarily honest and flippant about it. [0]
> And with that disclaimer out of the way, I must reiterate my sincere regrets to the CT/BAGS crowd, who so generously funded me to the tune of just shy of $300k last week on bags.fm. That money was hard to duck, and the funds are deeply appreciated. They will help Gas Town be a big success this year. But Gas Town itself needs my full attention; between that and Beads it’s a wonder I get anything done at all.
> So I had to step back from the community. I do find it amazing how they band together, dissenting voices rolling around like a big Katamari Damacy ball, and yet they somehow collectively find the discipline to act like financial analysts for institutional investors, weighing developer dossiers, product business cases, and doing critiques like a collective of professionals. All in crypto-bro speak. But it’s the same due diligence.
> But the CT community, like any highly engaged stakeholders, were going to be asking for a lot of my time. There are always strings attached.
[0] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/steveys-birthday-blog-34f4371...
Quarrelsome•1h ago
[0] https://x.com/Steve_Yegge/status/2044114434348724351
coldtea•1h ago
Quarrelsome•27m ago
throw-93•1h ago
RIMR•1h ago
Also, it's cryptocurrency. There is literally no burden to prove that this money was donated, or what "charity" even means in this context.
overgard•1h ago
coldtea•1h ago
georgemcbay•56m ago
I'm not accusing him of doing anything wrong as he didn't originate the coin, but his original disclosure messaging on the situation was pretty horrible which is why it harmed his reputation.
Zafira•55m ago
The sad thing is that it often works.
Just look at how people view Andrew Carnegie now. After his reputation was sullied by his company’s behavior in the Homestead Strike, his philanthropy was done, in-part, to try and restore his reputation.
toraway•26m ago
His "apology" would be more effective without including all the whining about accurately describing the sequence of events he voluntarily participated it for personal gain.
Leynos•1h ago
Edit: Apparently so: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vib...
foltik•1h ago
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-...
QuercusMax•1h ago