Does Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits to improve itself?

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.

> 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...

> 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.

Accidentally leave a browser tab open and it burns $5 of your electricity overnight to make $2 for the owner of the website.

The outcome will be similar.

This judgement feels premature.

We really don't have any idea what is possible. The wheels within wheels, epicycles within epicycles model of agentic loops hasn't really been deeply explored and we just don't know where they might go.

I too share your instinct that human steering helps, helps a lot. But I've found I can keep using less of it, as I setup better parameters, as I improve conducing the LLM into good paths. The idea that an LLM could sit up top and help try not one idea at a time but try many things, then pick and cobble together next goes: that is madly madly madly exciting to me.

I don't want to keep being the bandwidth limiter in this system: I want to scale out. I haven't been following close or trying but I tend to think while total hands off is not the way, having LLMs that can cover a lot of terrain, explore a lot of solution spaces and directions, then assess how to put it together & what to take forward, and other practices of agents watching agents, has enormous potential.

Deliberate care relies on pre-obtained wisdom, and often, the human biases kind of suck and aren't they good. We aren't great at burning down our systems enough, at Chad Fowler Phoenix Architectures. I think the AI's lack of over deliberation and it's ability to try vastly more could be a huge advantage, could show diversity triumphing over specific crafted intent.

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.

You want to fatten the oligarchs by pretending this is open source and steal money from users?

And this doesn't even begin to get into the madness that is verification for software that matters and is exposed through multiple modalities. You cannot let an agent just vibe its way around "does this business-critical thing with these specific use cases do its job correctly", much as Yegge might have you believe.

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.

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.