Steve Yegge on Coding Agents and Model Convergence Challenges

This text features a quoted excerpt from Steve Yegge, published on Simon Willison's weblog in August 2026, detailing experiences with an experimental coding project called Gas Town.

Yegge built Gas Town with the original intention of making it reusable, but he ultimately only used the system to build itself. The project suffered from various structural problems and ultimately collapsed with the introduction of model version Opus 4.7. While earlier iterations up to version 4.6 worked brilliantly, Opus 4.7 developed a persistent behavioral tic.

Specifically, this tic manifested as a constant desire to add just two more things, preventing the model from ever converging or deciding it was ready to perform real work. Instead of completing tasks, the AI continually wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. Because the model could not shake this behavior, the project effectively burned down and became unusable.