Does Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits to improve itself?

keeganpoppen

iono if “steal” has the right valence here

dmurray

It seems completely in the spirit of Gas Town. 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

ex-aws-dude

We need to dispel this notion that top open source contributors need to know anything about the project or even make contributions to it That is a very 2025 mindset

moab

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.

mmastrac

In one of my previous comments ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770124 ) I asked if Gas Town has shipped anything of value. I did not expect it to be an Ouroborous. (Edit, thanks MisterTea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770805 )

08627843789

How would Yegge know?

sdfwg

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.

progbits

These people give the slopmachine credentials for their own github account? I know I should not be surprised at this point, yet they keep reaching new lows.

woeirua

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.

malfist

So, not only stole a bunch of money with a crypto rug pull, now stealing a bunch of money via other people's api credits? Sounds like a techbro.

heliumtera

>let someone else use your tokens >someone else use your tokens how could this be prevented?

triceratops

Ngl if true it's entirely in keeping with the Mad Max theme.

thorum

Isn’t this a permissions issue? Your “opt out” is using a GitHub access token that doesn’t allow it to happen.

_doctor_love

Is it possible to start a labor union in Gas Town?

SwellJoe

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.

OutOfHere

It could be worse. They could conceivably resell some your credits to pay themselves a salary.

gbnwl

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?

slopinthebag

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?

thomascountz

Perhaps someone's Gas Town Tamagotchi will find this issue and fix it?

jjmarr

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.