(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.

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.

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.

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!