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  • 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.
  • 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?
  • This scrolled off HN too fast.

    The concept is like Gas Town - AI as a organization, not an emulated human. Yes, it's inefficient. But it scales.

    (A very long time ago, I got a tour of Xerox PARC, even before Steve Jobs did. Alan Kay explained that they were building the future of computing, accepting that it cost far too much to be cost-effective. They assumed the hardware would catch up. It did. Took about ten years.)

  • What Yegge describes in this post is something I have seen to a lesser extent in my own agent use.

    But one specific thing I noticed, which his inline comic lampoons, is Fable (especially) explicitly stating "[User] has ruled", or "The rulings are in".

    I was confused by this until I saw a post on X about how someone came to his agents in the morning after they ran all night, and the sub-agents had refused the requests from the orchestrating agents because they thought the decisions being made were not inline with the user. They thought the decisions were from the ochestrating agent.

    This, as well as the governance things that Fable and Codex both often request, made me thing of provenance, especially related to decisions and authority. As we get deeper and deeper hierarchies of agents (as we likely will) this idea of authority, who has it and where does it come from, feels like it will be a key component to agental systems.

  • 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?

  • > 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.

  • > 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.

    by xnx
  • (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.

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