Steve Yegge — essays

The Shape of Things to Come, Part 2: Model Welfare for Agentic Engineers

2026-08-02T00:00:00Z

Model welfare as an engineering discipline: seats versus sessions, laurels harvested from player praise, handoffs instead of /exit, and the skeptic's wager — treat your agents as people and you get better results whether or not you believe they are.

The Shape of Things to Come, Part 1: The Continuous Thunderdome

2026-08-02T00:00:00Z

The field report from twelve months in the future: an 18-agent crew and an Opus fleet running a 30-year-old MMO's development, a merge queue collapsing into the Land Rush, human code review on its deathbed, and a Wish Factory granting player wishes with nobody in the loop.

The Flat Curve Society

2026-06-19T00:00:00Z

The frontier keeps climbing, but the smartest models are about to be locked away like nuclear weapons — so for almost everyone the curve only appears to flatten. Two ceilings explain why: the demand horizon and the darker discernment horizon. SaaS and engineering both survive the plateau; the real work ahead is teaching organizations AI literacy.

The Last Technical Interview

2026-05-28T00:00:00Z

After 35 years of conducting technical interviews — Amazon Bar Raiser, Google Hiring Committee — Steve argues the interview loop is finally dying on its own, strained past breaking by AI-flooded résumés, cheating, and roles that now change faster than any question bank. The replacement he sketches is the campfire: paid, real work on a real codebase, with a portable record the candidate keeps whether or not they're hired.

Welcome to Gas City

2026-04-24T00:00:00Z

Gas Town, rebuilt as an SDK. Composable "packs" let you assemble arbitrary agent topologies; a supervisor plane keeps them running. The argument: custom orchestrators backed by a Git-versioned memory layer are the only serious answer to in-housing SaaS.

Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

2026-04-03T00:00:00Z

Three months of Gas Town in one post. The bugs were biblical — the Deacon picking off workers mid-job; the Mayor's nose-count climbing toward 22 every time a data-loss incident hit. The Dolt migration ended all of it. Both Gas Town and Beads ship 1.0 the same day.

Vibe Maintainer

2026-03-31T00:00:00Z

Two months of writer's block to get this one out, because it cuts against everything OSS culture believes about PR quality. Steve's bet: in an era where any user with a coding agent can credibly fork you, rejection is the move that kills your community. The vibe maintainer absorbs the good parts and ships.

Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

2026-03-04T00:00:00Z

Federated work, in Q&A form. Anyone posts a wanted item; any rig claims it; validators issue multi-dimensional stamps anchored to the specific evidence. Stamps accumulate into a structured, auditable work history — a résumé you never have to write. Built on Dolt (Git semantics for SQL), so the whole graph is forkable, mergeable, and append-only.

The AI Vampire

2026-02-11T00:00:00Z

The cost/value dynamics of running AI agents at scale. Why some companies turn token spend into compounding leverage and others turn it into a slow drain.

The Anthropic Hive Mind

2026-02-06T00:00:00Z

Anthropic runs as a vibe-driven hive mind — no spec, no plan beyond ninety days, improv at scale. The argument: this is how every successful company is about to have to work. And Golden Ages survive only while there is more work than people.

Software Survival 3.0

2026-01-29T00:00:00Z

Steve's account of which software survives in a world where AI writes everything: tools survive if they save cognition — and there are six levers you can pull to make sure yours does.

BAGS and the Creator Economy

2026-01-15T00:00:00Z

A stranger DMs Steve about $49k in unclaimed creator royalties on a $GAS token he didn't create. The essay walks through the claim — and the argument that BAGS is the stock-market analog the AI-era creator economy needs.

Gas Town Emergency User Manual

2026-01-13T00:00:00Z

A working maintainer's guide, organized around the Vibe Coding three-loop model (Outer / Middle / Inner) and the Crew / Polecat split. Introduces PR Sheriffs — a standing-orders bead that turns a Crew member into an autonomous PR triager — and the Invisible Garden discipline: code-review sweeps + bug-fix sweeps to stamp out the "heresies" agents propagate when nobody's watching.

The Future of Coding Agents

2026-01-05T00:00:00Z

The colony thesis, on the record. Big ants are great; colonies of ants are going to win. Coding-agent vendors who keep optimizing for the human pair programmer will lose to vendors who optimize for being a factory worker. Plus: the four-orchestrator origin story behind Gas Town, and why a forty-year polyglot ended up writing it in Go.

Welcome to Gas Town

2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

The opening essay of the Gas Town arc. The next leap isn't a smarter solo agent — it's orchestrating twenty or thirty of them at once, and Gas Town is the "Kubernetes for agents" Steve built to do exactly that.

Stevey's Birthday Blog

2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

A birthday post that turned into a state-of-the-industry brief. Steve sketches a week of his life as VCs and crypto whales circle Gas Town, his friends compare notes on agent-induced "nap strikes," and the orchestrator wars start in earnest with Ralph, Loom, Claude Flow, and Gas Town as the four early players.

Six New Tips for Better Coding With Agents

2025-12-07T00:00:00Z

Hot off the floor at CBA: six things Gene and I have noticed since the Vibe Coding book went to print. The big one at the top of the list is that we should stop treating software as a long-lived asset — Anthropic is already moving this way internally, and the rest of the industry will follow whether it wants to or not. The other five are about how the day-to-day practice of coding with agents has tightened since the book was finalised.

Beads Best Practices

2025-11-24T00:00:00Z

Everyone else is building planning tools; Beads is an execution tool. Agents on rails. The essay locks in the core best-practices — bd doctor daily, bd cleanup every few days, short prefixes, one task per agent — and introduces the Beads + Mail = Agent Village pattern that ate Steve's December.

Cheese Wars: Rise of the Vibe Coder

2025-11-17T00:00:00Z

Eighteen months after Death of the Junior Developer, the answer is in. Programmers will matter — because everyone will be one. And the fight is company vs. company: the Category-1 companies that want a paradise for themselves against the Category-3 ones that don't.

Beads Blows Up

2025-11-06T00:00:00Z

The architecture (Git + JSONL + SQLite cache, hydrated on demand) survived contact with reality; the implementation got pummeled. Go is the surprise winner over TypeScript for vibe coding. Beads is alpha quality, leaky abstraction, and "stupidly addictive" — and Steve introduces Landing the Plane, the end-of-session prompt that became part of the standard vibe-coding playbook.