“Design becomes the limiting factor: imagining what you want to create and figuring out all the gnarly details required.”

Maggie Appleton examines Steve Yegge’s Gas Town, an agent orchestration system he “vibecoded” without ever looking at the code. The system is, by Appleton’s own assessment, “a moderate design fail” that “fits the shape of Yegge’s brain and no one else’s,” costs $2,000-$5,000 per month in API fees, loses work constantly, and fixes the same bugs multiple times. Appleton nevertheless insists it contains valuable “speculative design” patterns worth studying. The more obvious conclusion—that building systems you refuse to understand produces expensive garbage—goes unmentioned.