(2026-01-19) Yegge Steveys Birthday Blog

Steve Yegge: Stevey’s Birthday Blog. My birthday’s coming up, Jan 20th. Fifty-seven. I’m not sure what I thought I’d be doing right now, 30 years ago. But I wouldn’t have guessed being in the best physical shape of my life, cranking out thousands of lines of production code per day, chatting all day with brilliant friends all around the world, and generally having an absolute blast.

There’s a lot going on, and it’s speeding up. Here’s a sketch of how my week has been. I’ll talk about five themes: Money, Time, Power, Control, and Direction.

Part 1: Money

There is a lot of money in AI, deserved or no. And even more money is sniffing around trying to get in to AI. The world’s money is like a conscious thing, and it exerts pressure as it sloshes around

First and foremost, it smells changes for software devs. But that’s just a precursor to all knowledge workers being changed somehow by AI. Soon. Money knows this. Money wants the fuck in.

My deepest apologies to the fifteen or sixteen VCs who have reached out so far, at a rate of roughly one per day since launch. I appreciate you. I’ve given it a lot of thought. But I’m not likely to go that route. I’m sure there are nice $200B businesses to be built on both Beads and on Gas Town, but I’m aiming bigger. They both build directly toward the third movie in my software orchestration trilogy, and I need to be relentlessly focused on that, not chasing ARR.

what I’m building toward isn’t financially defensible. It’s not a moat. It’s a life raft.

I posted about it in detail a few days ago, someone created a meme coin about Gas Town and within a week I had made $300k USD in cryptocurrency transaction fees on that coin, which traded something like 16 million dollars in volume

I didn’t create $GAS and have no control over its price, supply, or liquidity.

That money was hard to duck, and the funds are deeply appreciated. They will help Gas Town be a big success this year. But Gas Town itself needs my full attention; between that and Beads it’s a wonder I get anything done at all.

So I had to step back from the community. I do find it amazing how they band together

In short, I’m avoiding tying myself to any money that makes demands on my time or direction.

Part 2: Time

This week the surprise phenomenon was nappy time. Yeah, I don’t use the word “surprising” lightly. High-end vibe coding is fucking with our sleep cycles.

I’d work late at night, and then have to take deep naps in the middle of the day. I’d just be working along and boom, I’d drop. I have a pillow and blanket on the floor next to my workstation. I’ll just dive in and be knocked out for 90 minutes, once or often twice a day.

This wasn’t happening last year. It wasn’t until we’d started working with a dozen or more agents at once and doing swarming of large piles of work.

Our hypothesis is that we’re operating at such a high level of decision-making that we’re exhausting some internal buffers, and need to grab some gradient-descent time before we can continue.

To me it feels like Jeff Bezos Mode. I used to work for the man, and he basically spent his day listening carefully to presentations that smart people had prepared for him. They were never presenting easy shit. You only presented hard problems to Bezos. He had to absorb new information incredibly fast all day long, come up to speed on the spot, and make decisions that didn’t conflict with each other. I call that Jeff Bezos Mode, and it’s why he was always 18 steps ahead of all of the rest of us. He was solving curated puzzles all day, and it gave him otherworldly perspective.
It must have been utterly exhausting. Even for him.

With Claude Opus 4.5 swarms, you flit from agent to agent, only stopping at the ones that have finished their work and have produced a report for you.

We’re all pretty old, though, so YMMV. I don’t remember Bezos running off to take naps. Maybe this phenomenon only hits senior citizens. But the much younger Geoffrey Huntley, who was kind enough to pre-review this blog post, shared that it was happening to him all last year, and continues to this day

Part 3: Power

I caught up today with Jeffrey Emanuel, who just launched a Rust port of Beads (pre-Gas Town API). He confirmed what I’ve been seeing myself and hearing from others, which is that things are starting to accelerate insanely at the bleeding edges of software development.

Jeffrey, as we saw from his X posts, has bought so many Claude Pro Max $200/month plans (22 so far, or $4400/month in tokens) that he got auto-banned by Anthropic’s fraud detection

Among other things, he has recently ported a large number of popular libraries to Rust. All the Charm TUI libraries, fastapi, fastmcp, sqlmodel, a bunch of other stuff... projects he spins off as he works towards his bigger ambitions, which he’s sketched for me.

I’d just like to remind everyone that I predicted this pay-to-play productivity boost, betting a lot of my own rep on it, in Revenge of the Junior Developer, ten months ago. ((2025-03-22) Yegge Revenge Of The Junior Developer)

I’m sure there aren’t many people quite as far along as Jeffrey; on my 8-level chart he’s a level 10. But they do exist, and their ranks are growing.

There are on-ramps for the less crazy users. Gas Town, Claude Flow, and Loom are all gentle introductions to working with dozens of concurrent agents.

They let you grow into the idea gradually, and it scales up with you as you practice

When you reach Level 8, building your own orchestrators, Gas Town may not be enough for you. You may want to try Gas City, my upcoming orchestration-builder toolkit, which I’ll talk about below

Software engineering has always been incredibly high-leverage relative to other craft professions.

*You could always find programmers who are 10x or 100x better than the average programmer, and you don’t see such a broad distribution in most other professions.

With agentic coding, it’s about to go to 1000x or even 10000x.*

The more agents you can run successfully, the further you climb up the exponential curve, because it’s recursive: agents can run agents who run agents. The trick will be to manage that without becoming the Flying Wallendas. It will happen.

If you can afford the tokens, and you can find the tokens, you will be able to build things like you never imagined. You just have to learn how to tame the camels.

As I predicted in RotJD, you tame them with orchestrators: the new IDEs.

Part 4: Control

Agent orchestrators are programs that use agents to run other agents.
There are, as far as I can tell, four main players in this space: Ralph Wiggum, Loom, Claude Flow, and Gas Town. More will come very soon, from all corners

my thoughts on how to tell the current group apart, as they are all very important.
This is just a snapshot of my current thinking. I haven’t used any of the other orchestrators

First off, I’d like to reiterate my deepest respect to the creators of these orchestrators. They’re the level 9s,

I think Geoffrey Huntley and I have been exploring two of the key components of the Industrial Revolution happening in agentic software development: factories, and workers. In my view, Claude Code is a worker. Geoffrey has built a super-worker, and also a team of super workers with Loom, whereas I’ve built a super-factory. These are all orthogonal, complementary, and necessary.

Claude Flow is a bit different; it also tries to be a factory, and it’s quite clever, but it’s not thinking about the problem the way I am.

All three of the others have orchestration as their core primitive. Whereas for Gas Town, the work itself is the primitive.

Gas Town federates work into an auditable ledger for tracking millions of work items in a blockchain. I’m solving a completely different problem. Gas Town’s orchestration facilities are a thin layer atop a work-definition stack. And in time, Gas Town will be rewritten in that stack, in a much more flexible way, allowing for all sorts of orchestration shapes. (Beads)

Geoffrey Huntley and I have been chatting and plotting together lately, with more collaboration to come. One amusing thing we discovered is that we were each tackling the other’s problem last year. I was working on a super-agent (basically, quality) and he was working on swarming (quantity). We each built multiple complete implementations. And toward the end of the year, we each flipped to the opposite problem. In my view, Geoffrey’s Ralph loops are a brilliant automation of the discovery that LLMs can self-review to convergence, which I believe Jeffrey Emanuel was also onto with his (weaker, manual) Rule of Five.

Gas Town’s focus is the work, the stuff you know needs to be done, independent of superintelligence. I’m a big believer in the MEOW stack, Nondeterministic Idempotence, and Beads as a Universal Data Plane. These are all critically important differentiators for Gas Town, and they will yield unexpected emergent benefits over time because of the audit trail.

I contend that Beads was like the discovery of oil. Right now everyone is playing with it and lighting lanterns, not realizing it’s going to turn into the global petroleum industry for data. Gas Town makes work (Beads) shoot out in geysers

Let’s talk about how Gas Town will find exactly the right shape for you.

Part 5: Direction

I’ve mentioned that Dario Amodei refers to 2026 as “The Endgame.” Well, we’re here.

Gas Town has a deep stack, but its current form factor is just a sketch. All the roles are completely hardwired in the Go code. Gas Town has Go modules dedicated to the Witness, Refinery, Mayor, Deacon, Polecats, etc

But halfway through the implementation, I realized the MEOW stack had become powerful enough to abstract away the roles themselves, allowing you to express them in a sort of DSL based on Beads, with just a little orchestration glue.
I chatted with Claude, and we decided to finish Gas Town and then turn around and immediately begin work on the SDK-builder that lets you build your own Gas Town, with your own roles, teams, coordination rules, and worker instructions.

Ralph loops are effectively tasks. A Ralph loop is fundamentally concerned with finishing a task at a high level of quality.

A Gas Town patrol is fundamentally concerned with recording task execution for a well-defined sequence of steps, often done in a loop

ETLs are an old-fashioned kind of patrol

Businesses are all built on patrols, but we don’t call them that because they have not historically had humanlike intelligence. Starting in 2026, they will.

A patrol step is a task. So I feel the ideal patrol will turn out to be one that invokes a Ralph loop at each step, at least for steps that require complex processing

In addition to making patrols more reliable, I think another huge Ralph win for Gas Town will be for the polecats, which are ephemeral Claude Code instances that handle feature work, bug fixes, code reviews, and other one-shot tasks.

once a polecat finally spins up and takes its task, it has proven about as trustworthy as a real polecat.

The polecats are unsupervised, uncoordinated, and left on their own to get to the finish line. You spend a lot of time asking the Mayor to poke them to finish up. This is a quality problem, and Ralph will solve it brilliantly. And for more complex tasks, Loom or Claude Flow could push it even further, tackling ever-larger problems.

Gas City is what I’m calling my next iteration, where you can define your own custom roles in addition to patrols etc. I’ve got some stuff in the queue to finish up first, such as switching Beads to use the amazing Dolt database, which I’ll post about soon