We should take Yegge’s creation seriously not because it’s a serious, working tool for today’s developers (it isn’t). But because it’s a good piece of speculative design fiction that asks provocative questions and reveals the shape of constraints we’ll face as agentic coding systems mature and grow.
[...]
When you have a fat stack of agents churning through code tasks, development time is no longer the bottleneck. Yegge says “Gas Town churns through implementation plans so quickly that you have to do a LOT of design and planning to keep the engine fed.” Design becomes the limiting factor: imagining what you want to create and then figuring out all the gnarly little details required to make your imagination into reality.
[...]
When it’s not the design, it’s the product strategy and planning; What are the highest priority features to tackle? Which piece of this should we build first? When do we need to make that decision? What’s the next logical, incremental step we need to make progress here?
[...]
With agents to hand, it’s easy to get ahead of yourself, stumbling forward into stacks of generated functions that should never have been prompted into existence, because they do not correctly render your intentions or achieve your goals.
Gas Town seems to be halfway into this pitfall. The biggest flaw in Yegge’s creation is that it is poorly designed. I mean this in the sense that he absolutely did not design the shape of this system ahead of time, thoughtfully considering which metaphors and primitives would make this effective, efficient, easy to use, and comprehensible.