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nepthar 4 hours ago [-]
(Asking sincerely in good faith - I read this note along with skimming a few of the linked ones, and I'm familiar with gastown)
Can someone explain the value calculation to me? This seems like someone has truly let AI VASTLY expand the codebase of what seems to be a medium sized hobby game to ~10-100x the amount of engineering required. Especially with statements about how wheelhouse, his software factory, has grown to nearly the size of the actual software he's writing. He also mentions several times that wheelhouse is specific to developing the game. Then, he discusses "pulling in beads" which itself seems on my read to be enormously engineered. (note that he also says that you burn a lot of tokens with agents "keeping your beads in sync" and I didn't have the time to figure out what that meant, but it looks like as complicated as it is, beads can't reconcile itself without burning $$$).
It seems like if you answer "yes" at every time you have the question of "can I make AI do this", you end up burning $120k/month in tokens on your side project.
Again, I am not disparaging this- but I feel like I am genuinely missing something and would welcome help understanding it.
FinnLobsien 3 hours ago [-]
I guess this is a question of what you believe code and software engineering writ large is for.
If you believe that good engineering practice matters (in the sense that your software is maintainable, efficient, etc.), then this is horrific because the human has no idea what’s going on and any attempt to fix something by hand would probably uncover enough complications to make you consider rewriting from scratch.
But if your only qualifier is “does it do what I want it to do?” then this is perfectly fine. If you throw out the assumption that a human will ever maintain the code or need to understand it, then who cares if your main branch is full of unused code and it’s outrageously complex.
In a way, I guess this is a similar moment to abstract painting in the early 20th century.
If your assumption was that the point of a painting is to accurately capture a landscape or person, then abstract paintings are an abomination.
If you believe paintings should evoke a feeling and depicting people or landscapes are only one way to get there, you can throw out all the sketching and composing and painting technique.
mplewis 12 minutes ago [-]
ok, but when steve made gas town, it didn't actually do anything but build more gas town.
watwut 2 hours ago [-]
Meh, the actual complaint is that it does not really do what it should and keeps burning those $$$ as you ask it to fix this or that.
zellyn 1 hours ago [-]
Disclaimer: I work at an AI lab [edit: but speak for myself :-)]
The value proposition is an average of 270 commits a day, for $4000/month, and the dramatic improvements to the game Yegge described. Even supposing 2/3 of them are burned on the scaffolding, 90 commits/day (assuming they’re of mostly good quality) would cost multiple engineers, one of which would cost much more than $48k/year.
As another comment said, the ultimate proof will be in the pudding. But I don’t think the value proposition claimed is complicated.
cowpig 51 minutes ago [-]
> I am spending the equivalent of $122k/month of API token spend, or about $4,000 per day, using 21 Claude Max accounts
That's ~$1.4 million/year
codethief 47 minutes ago [-]
Emphasis on "the equivalent".
Further down he writes:
> I am of course using sanctioned cheating: I get all those tokens because I'm an individual, with the Claude Max discount. So it "only" costs me about $5k/month out of pocket, for a 50-agent cluster running on a 512GB M3 Ultra Mac Studio I bought off eBay for $25k.
> So it's not $120k/month of real money, but it's still crazy spend.
jay_kyburz 2 hours ago [-]
Steve is not making a game, he is _playing_ the game of making games.
It's like playing Factorio but instead building a rocket to escape, you are building a game. Instead of messing around with mining drills and train tracks, he is deploying agents and thinking about how to interface with them.
I think it sounds like a super fun game.
update: with the added benefit that he might see a return on his investment as well!
nzoschke 2 hours ago [-]
You nailed it, this is a meta game.
AI lets you LARP.
Want to be the head of a game studio? "Hire" a bunch of game dev agents, put them to work in the software factory, get pretty progress updates and an actual game of sorts along the way.
Want to be the CEO of a startup? Hire a bunch of biz ops agents, and fire them when they make mistakes. Ship an actual website and MVP and make some numbers go up along the way.
If you know you're playing a game its fun and weird. But I worry for the people that don't know they're LARPing...
grebc 2 hours ago [-]
Pushing pixels around the screen is what I bluntly described the grand sum capabilities of AI to my brother, who is quite infatuated with it.
It wasn't appreciated.
zbentley 9 minutes ago [-]
Congratulations, you have reinvented RFCs, architecture reviews, linters, and integration tests. From first principles. With cutesy names.
xnx 3 hours ago [-]
> First, my secret: I see the future by living in it. I am spending the equivalent of $122k/month of API token spend, or about $4,000 per day, using 21 Claude Max accounts, a number that has been growing steadily at 2 per week.
Good to know that together, Yegge and Zitron bring balance to the force.
fractorial 25 minutes ago [-]
This is ludicrous; also, why publicly admit that blatant violation of ToS?
mplewis 11 minutes ago [-]
Anthropic doesn't actually mind if you use multiple subscriptions
mccoyb 4 hours ago [-]
> I am running an organization of around 50-60 agents, five of whom are interfacing with around 10 humans in the outside world: myself, my 5-person core game design team, my accountant, my chief of staff, and a few others. Only Fable is allowed to talk to humans, via Slack and email.
RIP to those poor humans. I can't imagine having your brain melted by Fablespeak as your FTJ.
jshaqaw 3 hours ago [-]
The proof is (or isn't) in the game. If the game is something genuinely great then this all worked and is important. If the game is a bloviated, boring, and derivative mess then it didn't. Without any proof point on the output it is hard to say if the article has any value.
SwellJoe 1 hours ago [-]
The player community seems to hold the opinion it's the latter. Steam reviews are pretty dire. Worse, there really aren't a lot of players. Certainly not enough to cover Yegge's absurd number of Claude Max accounts.
chowells 12 minutes ago [-]
Eh. A quick scan of steam reviews shows a clear pattern - the game has been in decline ever since Yegge took over, well before LLMs were a product. It seems he started upsetting people with a capitalist-brain insistence on extracting value, and nothing has changed since. As long as he doesn't understand that his goals are contrary to building a game people enjoy, quality of the code is completely irrelevant. I don't think this one works as a test case on the value of programming like this, as the intended audience just isn't interested.
AgentOrange1234 2 hours ago [-]
"Wheelhouse is about 600k lines of code and tests (mostly bash)"
This article is a joke right? Please tell me you are joking. Jesus christ.
mplewis 5 minutes ago [-]
Every time Steve goes deeper into the AI whirlpool his engineering practices slip further from good.
CoolestBeans 4 hours ago [-]
What is the overhead to have agents play model UN? Why is the coordination so elaborate? It sounds like a deeply complex and expensive emergent behavior that maybe looks comprehensible but could be nonsensical. Also like any complex system, can you actually predict the outcomes?
Waste is a failure case. How do we know the code factory is actually productive or just agents filling up the computation resource cap because they can?
kodoman 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah I have noticed lots of agent stuff recently seems to be spin as many agents up as possible have a whole office of agents. Just keep spinning more AI bastards up, give names to your AI bastards not descriptive names human names, set up email messages for your AI bastards and wonder why your stressed out that you have messages from Dave, Linda and Michael and the other Dave. I think a lot of this sort of thinking is probably going to cause mental exhausting and so wasteful. Steve is a intelligent guy but I find my self thinking the whole build an AI office or company thing is not going to be the way things work in the future and better harnesses and agents that are particularized with highly particularized tools and loop are where things are going to work better rather then lots of AI employees.
skywhopper 1 hours ago [-]
The companies selling these ideas (and tuning their products to work well in this mode) make money based on how much they are used. They’ve committed to ludicrous levels of demand growth that can’t possibly be sustained by direct human use. But if they make their own product drive multiple instances of their own product, you get exponential effects.
sneilan1 3 hours ago [-]
I'm glad someone is trying this and exploring what's possible. It's easy to deride his work by saying what's the value but are you running 50 fable agents and letting them run wild to see what the future looks like?
tediousgraffit1 3 hours ago [-]
I would if I had that kind of money!
jkubicek 1 hours ago [-]
If I had $122k/month to spend on tokens I would simply.... not.
$1.5mm/year buys more of everything I want out of life than I could possibly consume.
baruz 1 hours ago [-]
He’s using a $5k/month account to access the “equivalent” of $122k worth of tokens.
grebc 4 hours ago [-]
Yegge’s writing has declined proportionately to his AI usage.
AloysB 2 hours ago [-]
I genuinely wonder if he has completely lost touch with reality.
He seems to slowly become the Terry A. Davis of LLMs.
BeetleB 3 hours ago [-]
I used to read his stuff ~20 years ago. He has cool things to say, but his writing always sucked.
I often write lengthy pieces. Then I look at it and say "Oh no, I don't want to become Steve Yegge!"
throwaw12 11 minutes ago [-]
I think Steve somewhat predicted the future well. He might be slightly off, because he is overly optimistic and operates at the edge, but look at Gas Town, when it was released it felt like dystopian, today it looks not too far away, I am sure most of your orgs are already running some kind of agent to triage the tickets and in some cases automatically open the PR in your git repo.
I think he is onto something this time as well
AWebOfBrown 9 minutes ago [-]
I honestly think Yegge has reached a point where he knows he isn't interested in doing the leg work of today's software engineering, but wants his career to ride the wave. The lowest effort, maximum value to extract in his position is abusing the crap out LLMs to an extent that is genuinely novel to secure thought leadership, but on close inspection it's just pointless token spend driving blog posts and publicity.
To me it is absolutely farcical that he was being being paid by a harness company (Amp) as a staff software engineer, slop-coded a solution to keeping LLMs on track (Beads), and having paid for all of this Amp and Steve...parted ways. Beads never went into Amp. Someone cottoned on to the value Steve was providing, for my money.
nzoschke 2 hours ago [-]
Seems like this is the year of the sandbox and governance layers.
I recently wrote how we set all this up for our agent computers that help people with their email:
I do agree even more rules help keep things on track, but I do these as linters, specifically as Golang `go vet` and `go fix` commands. That works 100x better than any SKILL.md or team of agents in my experience.
fwlr 41 minutes ago [-]
> the subject matter is too complicated to explain … All I can do is walk you around like an excited tour guide, one who has unearthed an ancient alien civilization.
Now this is AI psychosis.
Theory5 51 minutes ago [-]
I don't even like the idea of humans operating without guardrails where I work, much less AI.
perrygeo 36 minutes ago [-]
> So it's not $120k/month of real money, but it's still crazy spend. I would guess I'm one of a handful of top individuals on Earth outside the frontier labs, in terms of my experience with top-end models.
We get it bro, you buy lots of tokens. My son buys lots of pokemon cards. Still haven't seen shit for return on that investment either, but as long as its all in good fun, "you do you".
> That's how I'm able to tell the future. I'm living in a world that will not become cost-effective for most people for another year.
That's pretty easy to verify. #remindme August 24, 2027 - are $120k worth of tokens in 2026 generally "affordable" by 2027? By what mechanism have the economics shifted?
kibwen 2 hours ago [-]
In the glorious future where I can conjure a game with a snap of my fingers for the cost of a pack of gum, why would I ever choose to play Wyvern, the game tailored to Steve Yegge's tastes, when I could just make a game tailored to my tastes? Perhaps Steve will be content to play his MUD with agents pretending to be human players?
zbentley 4 minutes ago [-]
You joke, but even very simple/cheap AIs already make it a way bigger pain in the ass than it used to be to identify growth hacking fake user/signup/activity bullshit in all sorts of situations.
It was already bad out there. But now it’s worse.
coder-pm 4 hours ago [-]
How do you find the bad decisions with so many subscriptions active? isn't that looking for needle in a haystack:)?
elenaviter 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Avshalom 3 hours ago [-]
>This tier, or the one just after it, will power hundreds to thousands of new AI employees at every company.
>And companies are in no way, shape, or form prepared for this transition.
so, uh, what's the business model here?
BeetleB 4 hours ago [-]
> I didn't want this to be a long post, and I think I've succeeded.
Classic Steve Yegge!
groby_b 2 hours ago [-]
"I would guess I'm one of a handful of top individuals on Earth outside the frontier labs, in terms of my experience with top-end models."
I'd argue that number of tokens burned does not translate into "experience".
And if you needed to spend $300k or so to find out that process helps manage larger efforts (process is what "fences" are outside Yegge-land), you sure spent a lot.
I mean, I'm glad the guy's got a a hobby he enjoys, but there's less insight than you'd hope for.
Can someone explain the value calculation to me? This seems like someone has truly let AI VASTLY expand the codebase of what seems to be a medium sized hobby game to ~10-100x the amount of engineering required. Especially with statements about how wheelhouse, his software factory, has grown to nearly the size of the actual software he's writing. He also mentions several times that wheelhouse is specific to developing the game. Then, he discusses "pulling in beads" which itself seems on my read to be enormously engineered. (note that he also says that you burn a lot of tokens with agents "keeping your beads in sync" and I didn't have the time to figure out what that meant, but it looks like as complicated as it is, beads can't reconcile itself without burning $$$).
It seems like if you answer "yes" at every time you have the question of "can I make AI do this", you end up burning $120k/month in tokens on your side project.
Again, I am not disparaging this- but I feel like I am genuinely missing something and would welcome help understanding it.
If you believe that good engineering practice matters (in the sense that your software is maintainable, efficient, etc.), then this is horrific because the human has no idea what’s going on and any attempt to fix something by hand would probably uncover enough complications to make you consider rewriting from scratch.
But if your only qualifier is “does it do what I want it to do?” then this is perfectly fine. If you throw out the assumption that a human will ever maintain the code or need to understand it, then who cares if your main branch is full of unused code and it’s outrageously complex.
In a way, I guess this is a similar moment to abstract painting in the early 20th century.
If your assumption was that the point of a painting is to accurately capture a landscape or person, then abstract paintings are an abomination.
If you believe paintings should evoke a feeling and depicting people or landscapes are only one way to get there, you can throw out all the sketching and composing and painting technique.
The value proposition is an average of 270 commits a day, for $4000/month, and the dramatic improvements to the game Yegge described. Even supposing 2/3 of them are burned on the scaffolding, 90 commits/day (assuming they’re of mostly good quality) would cost multiple engineers, one of which would cost much more than $48k/year.
As another comment said, the ultimate proof will be in the pudding. But I don’t think the value proposition claimed is complicated.
That's ~$1.4 million/year
Further down he writes:
> I am of course using sanctioned cheating: I get all those tokens because I'm an individual, with the Claude Max discount. So it "only" costs me about $5k/month out of pocket, for a 50-agent cluster running on a 512GB M3 Ultra Mac Studio I bought off eBay for $25k.
> So it's not $120k/month of real money, but it's still crazy spend.
It's like playing Factorio but instead building a rocket to escape, you are building a game. Instead of messing around with mining drills and train tracks, he is deploying agents and thinking about how to interface with them.
I think it sounds like a super fun game.
update: with the added benefit that he might see a return on his investment as well!
AI lets you LARP.
Want to be the head of a game studio? "Hire" a bunch of game dev agents, put them to work in the software factory, get pretty progress updates and an actual game of sorts along the way.
Want to be the CEO of a startup? Hire a bunch of biz ops agents, and fire them when they make mistakes. Ship an actual website and MVP and make some numbers go up along the way.
If you know you're playing a game its fun and weird. But I worry for the people that don't know they're LARPing...
It wasn't appreciated.
Good to know that together, Yegge and Zitron bring balance to the force.
RIP to those poor humans. I can't imagine having your brain melted by Fablespeak as your FTJ.
This article is a joke right? Please tell me you are joking. Jesus christ.
Waste is a failure case. How do we know the code factory is actually productive or just agents filling up the computation resource cap because they can?
$1.5mm/year buys more of everything I want out of life than I could possibly consume.
I often write lengthy pieces. Then I look at it and say "Oh no, I don't want to become Steve Yegge!"
I think he is onto something this time as well
To me it is absolutely farcical that he was being being paid by a harness company (Amp) as a staff software engineer, slop-coded a solution to keeping LLMs on track (Beads), and having paid for all of this Amp and Steve...parted ways. Beads never went into Amp. Someone cottoned on to the value Steve was providing, for my money.
I recently wrote how we set all this up for our agent computers that help people with their email:
https://housecat.com/blog/agent-computer-101
I do agree even more rules help keep things on track, but I do these as linters, specifically as Golang `go vet` and `go fix` commands. That works 100x better than any SKILL.md or team of agents in my experience.
Now this is AI psychosis.
We get it bro, you buy lots of tokens. My son buys lots of pokemon cards. Still haven't seen shit for return on that investment either, but as long as its all in good fun, "you do you".
> That's how I'm able to tell the future. I'm living in a world that will not become cost-effective for most people for another year.
That's pretty easy to verify. #remindme August 24, 2027 - are $120k worth of tokens in 2026 generally "affordable" by 2027? By what mechanism have the economics shifted?
It was already bad out there. But now it’s worse.
>And companies are in no way, shape, or form prepared for this transition.
so, uh, what's the business model here?
Classic Steve Yegge!
I'd argue that number of tokens burned does not translate into "experience".
And if you needed to spend $300k or so to find out that process helps manage larger efforts (process is what "fences" are outside Yegge-land), you sure spent a lot.
I mean, I'm glad the guy's got a a hobby he enjoys, but there's less insight than you'd hope for.