I agree, I’m one of the Very Serious Engineers and I liked Steve’s post when I thought it was sort of tongue in cheek but was horrified to come to the HN comments and LinkedIn comments proclaiming Gastown as the future of engineering. There absolutely is a large contingent of engineers who believe this, and it has a real world impact on my job if my bosses think you can just throw a dozen AI agents at our product roadmap and get better productivity than an engineer. This is not whimsical to me, I’m getting burnt out trying to navigate the absurd expectations of investors and executives with the real world engineering concerns of my day to day job.

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2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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meowface 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a half-joke. No need to take it that seriously or that jokingly. It's mostly only grifters and cryptocurrency scammers claiming it's amazing.

I think ideas from it will probably partially inspire future, simpler systems.

	▲	wonnage 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It may be a joke in the same way that brogramming was a joke and somehow became an enduring tech bro stereotype

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pstuart an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AI is such a fun topic -- the hype makes it easy to loath, but as a coder working with Claude I think it's an awesome tool.

Gastown looks like a viable avenue for some app development. One of the most interesting things I've noticed about AI development is that it forces one to articulate desired and prohibited behaviors -- a spec becomes a true driving force.

Yegge's posts are always hyperbolic and he consistently presents interesting takes on the industry so I'm willing to cut him a buttload of slack.

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lowbloodsugar an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I too am a Very Serious Engineer but my shock is in the other direction: of course the ideas behind Gas Town are the future of software development and several VSEs I know are developing a proper, robust, engineering version of it that works. As the author of this article here remarks “yes, but Steve did it first”, and it annoys me that if I had written this post nobody would have read it, but also that, because I intend to use it in Very Serious Business ($bns) my version isn’t ready to a actually be published yet. Bravo to Steve for getting these thoughts on paper and the idea built even in such crude form. But “level 8” is real and there will be 9s and 10s and I am really enjoying building my own.