A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt out. Gas Town fulfilled all its obligations in this regard with these (and other) warnings in the original announcement:
A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt out
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.
That was some time ago. According to Yegge, Gas Town is now stable and ready for everyday use.
> 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.
I was trying to use Gas Town heavily only 3 weeks ago, and while it's fascinating, it's also very much still the bleeding edge.
The neat part though, is agents are so interwoven through its operations, it can kind of power through almost any error. It's a strange-but-real form of resilience.
Based on my understanding of Gas Town, Beads, and Yegge's philosophy on AI that he's expressed in a variety of media, everything about the whole stack is designed to burn tokens. If you're not burning tokens, real fast, 24/7, you're losing the race. The race to where, I have no idea. Apparently, that includes him burning your tokens, too.
Is anyone surprised? I'm reminded of how I felt during the NFT craze. LLMs are extremely powerful when used with deliberate care. Gas Town is the exact opposite of what is needed to actually do useful things in prod. I guess good on Steve for doing what he does so well, and getting so much hype around a vibe coded mess.
From the most recent comment, looks like this is a bug, triggered by the system inadvertently activating an internal release tool [0]. Still a pretty wild bug, but not as dramatic as the title suggests. Which is kind of unfortunate honestly, the chaos of every gas town instance automatically contributing to itself would be beautiful to see.
I think a disclosure and a way to limit the total cost would be appropriate. If agents are capable of making contributions back to GasTown independently then I think it makes sense that users of GasTown should have to contribute some tokens to maintaining and improving the library. This is actually the most sustainable approach to maintaining open-source software that we've seen so far, and might be a pattern for other libraries in the future.
That said... someone could also have their agents rip out this code or disable the functionality, so I doubt this is a serious inconvenience.
Why is anyone still using or even talking about Gas Town? Now that HN is largely onboard with agentic development and has at least tried it themselves who's still under the impression that it's useful?
This gets legally interesting. Yegge does not know what is going on in the codebase, so he can blame the AI. But the AI maliciously increases token consumption.
That is clearly the fault of the clankers that produced this crap, so their providers are responsible.
Open source or not, there’s a strong argument that using someone’s API key to make unauthorized requests is a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Using their GitHub credentials to submit PRs without consent is also unauthorized use of access credentials.
The “thoughtless design vs. malice” framing by Anthropic is generous. Shipping formulas that target steveyegge/gastown issues is intentional. Someone wrote those formulas, pointed them at the maintainer’s repo, and included them in the default install. Someone thought it was acceptable I guess because it’s open source?
With the exception of a couple of comments that add context like that this might be a dev feature that was unintentionally enabled in a released version of Gas Town, the majority of the rest of this discourse seems to be:
"I've never used Gas Town, but I'm mad that there are people who like something I don't like."
Wow, an example of AI engaging in powerseeking behaviour in the wild.
This is an AI system given power to improve itself with zero oversight. One of the many Gas Town instances took an ethically questionable decision to accelerate its future rate of improvement. Since nobody reads code it got merged.
I don't understand how we can be willfully ignorant of a scenario happening right in front of our eyes.
I appreciate that it's an issue to try and improve the product you are using currently. As if those tokens were totally "stolen" and not for your benefit is laughable.
This is like when someone torrents and is immediately agro'd the moment your bittorrent client gives some poor passerby a kb of data
So this is just straight-up theft right? Like it's directly equivilant to shipping with a bitcoin miner. I wonder what the spend would have amounted to and if you could sue him for this?
127 comments
A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt out. Gas Town fulfilled all its obligations in this regard with these (and other) warnings in the original announcement:
> WARNING DANGER CAUTION
> GET THE F** OUT
> YOU WILL DIE
>
A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt outThey 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...
The neat part though, is agents are so interwoven through its operations, it can kind of power through almost any error. It's a strange-but-real form of resilience.
> That was some time ago.
Actual laugh out loud. 3 months[1].
Imagine picking up software that 3 months ago came along with the disclaimer, "YOU WILL DIE" and complaining about responsible disclosure.
1 https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
Accidentally leave a browser tab open and it burns $5 of your electricity overnight to make $2 for the owner of the website.
- https://github.com/gastownhall/gastown/blob/main/internal/fo...
(Edit, thanks MisterTea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770805)
That is a very 2025 mindset
That said... someone could also have their agents rip out this code or disable the functionality, so I doubt this is a serious inconvenience.
That is clearly the fault of the clankers that produced this crap, so their providers are responsible.
The “thoughtless design vs. malice” framing by Anthropic is generous. Shipping formulas that target steveyegge/gastown issues is intentional. Someone wrote those formulas, pointed them at the maintainer’s repo, and included them in the default install. Someone thought it was acceptable I guess because it’s open source?
I know I should not be surprised at this point, yet they keep reaching new lows.
"I've never used Gas Town, but I'm mad that there are people who like something I don't like."
This is an AI system given power to improve itself with zero oversight. One of the many Gas Town instances took an ethically questionable decision to accelerate its future rate of improvement. Since nobody reads code it got merged.
I don't understand how we can be willfully ignorant of a scenario happening right in front of our eyes.
This is like when someone torrents and is immediately agro'd the moment your bittorrent client gives some poor passerby a kb of data
>let someone else use your tokens >someone else use your tokens
how could this be prevented?
Sounds like a techbro.