Dispatch
Steve Yegge shut down Gas Town, and Databricks says rolling GPT-6 Astra to 3,500 engineers raised coding spend about 60%
Latent Space's 17 September AI News issue collects two cost reality checks on agent orchestration. Yegge, who spent thousands a month on coding agent subscriptions and was the loudest voice for token maximalism, discontinued Gas Town and conceded he never successfully built anything with it other than Gas Town itself. Separately, Databricks' Patrick Wendell reported that deploying GPT-6 Astra to roughly 3,500 engineers raised overall coding spend by about 60%, and the company created a dedicated budget so Astra is used selectively rather than as a blanket replacement, even though it unambiguously outperforms prior models on hard system design work.
↳ Follow the thread