> has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting?

No.

This post sets up a straw man from the outset, and only gets worse from there.

I understand how we got here, where many experienced programmers, managers, and bloggers only know capital-A Agile as the watered down version sold via certifications, crummy medium posts, and atlassian flavored kanban boards. But that isn't agile.

I can’t even with the pitch into spec driven development as some sort of high watermark of software methodology.

Bragging about loc was silly before ai. Now it’s not only silly, but also makes you look like a huge tool.

I have no idea what the loc of any of my projects are. Why would I care?

And why do other people care? It's not "line of code" is an uniform measurement you can apply between languages.

A 1 loc Perl program can do more things than a 1000 lines of Enterprise-grade Java.

Wow. So much hate in the comments here. Of all the funding / equity events lately, I wonder how this one gets so much doubt and distrust from the start.

If this isn’t something to at least root for, in the sense of a small team, novel product, serving a real need, then I dunno what is. You can use jj or tangled and still appreciate improvements to git and vcs on the web in general. Competition amongst many players is a good thing, even if you don’t believe in this one particular vision.

Heaven forbid it isn’t 100M going to a YC alum for yet another AI funding raise.

There is nothing inherently special about the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Why do they need $17m to build this? Vibe code it in a couple weeks, ship it.

Nothing in this project looks vibecoded. I compel you to try vibecoding this in a couple weeks if you think it’s possible, and then after that to build a business out of it. If the only thing stopping you is the code, you should give it a try.

Yeah /simplify is your friend. That and constrained prompts - “refactor x for simplicity - resulting diff must remove n lines of code. Dont change tests. “

Wait what. For real? I knew their security posture was bad, but this bad??

They're talking about before it's configured by the user. It defaults to 'free' models so that the user can ask a question immediately on startup. Once you configure a provider, the default models aren't used.

This has been the case for 15-20 years at least. It’s only now that the horrible experience for regular users is so obvious compared to Linux becoming quite good, and Mac OS ranging from fine to meh.

The continual recall/ai push from Microsoft has not helped at all and is pretty gross. There is a way to do a “recall” style thing that some folks will really want if they can trust it. The msft approach has been the opposite of that.

If you believe this has any long term staying power at MSFT, I have a bridge to sell you paid for with MSFT stock funded by quarterly earnings reports.

Yes. This. Too little too late MSFT.

And it really comes down to $MSFT. If the stock keeps dropping, how long do you think any real commitment to “quality” for a boring, low(no?) revenue product will last? Very little when the ad/partner revenue really starts flowing for “ai focused metrics” that can directly tie to windows surveillance (ie recall).

I’ve found LLM development expands the scope of what I can do to an absurd level. This is what exhausts me.

My limits are now many of the same things that are have always been core to software dev, but are now even more obvious:

- what is the thing we are building? What is the core product or bug fix or feature?

- what are we _not_ building? What do we not care about?

- do I understand the code enough to guide design and architecture?

- can I guide dev and make good choices when it’s far outside my expertise but I know enough to “smell” when things are going off the rails

It’s a weird time