Thank you for the kind words! I did end up taking that five month break in my writing to try and develop a different voice, but it's a struggle. Because our company runs pretty smoothly, the original source of stuff I was angry about has sorta dried up. I still see people do crazy things, but I'm a distant observer.
For the sake of honesty, I should say that these aren't wild amounts of money, it's just a high effective hourly rate. If we achieved 100% utilisation, it would be, but really we're just making enough to get close to our corporate salaries, but on a fraction of the hours. As a business, we need to make more than this in the long-term to be sustainable, as a business is a lot more susceptible to shocks than an employee is. I don't get redundancy if sales dry up!
I've managed to recruit in Perth, which is probably as cursed as it gets. The two things are:
1. I don't bother recruiting on the public market. They're genuinely too incompetent, and you'd have the issue you raised over and over. We sent exactly one candidate to a "normal" company and it was a total waste of time
2. For the remaining companies, I basically consult for free to help them smooth out their process. Places that are already very good but candidate-starved don't need this, but most of them could use a small hand. This is maybe non-trivial to replicate but I have a reasonable psychology background and that has given me some aptitude for feeling out cultural fits. Recruiters have set their rates so absurdly high for no service that I can do this, AND run two hour tech interviews personally with candidates AND undercut competitors and still hit that $1K per hour rate. It's just nuts
Interesting! I suppose my thought is that once you scale up to running a team of recruiters you end up incentivising behaviours like 'build a list of CVs', 'pattern-match on keywords' and other pointless nonsense. I have run in to a couple of decent recruiters and their behaviour was much closer to 'have a coffee and chat'. I hope you'll talk about your experience because I'm keen to hear about it.
It's bedtime in Melbourne, but I write what would be fair to call a well-known tech blog, and very publicly started a consultancy about 1.5 years ago. Pretty much in the same niche you're in. We made enough money to pay two people full -time wages in the first year and I've cracked $1K per hour on some engagements (not many, and each one was <20 hours).
My history is all pretty public on the blog, but tl;dr write every day, don't be a coward re: topic, and work hard at writing well. It's easier than ever to meet cool people in tech through writing since almost everyone is spamming nonsense on AI.
I'm firing you for being unable to adequately commune with the machine spirit.
(But for real, a good test suite seems like a great place to start before letting an LLM run wild... or alternatively just do what you're doing. We definitely respect textbook-readers more than prompters!)
I thought it was harmless(ish) fun, but David Gerard put out a post stating that Yegge used Gas Town to push out a crypto project that rug pulled his supporters, while he personally walked away with something between $50K to $100K from memory.
I suppose that has little to do with the technical merits of the work, but it's such a bad look, and it makes everyone boosting this stuff seem exactly as dysregulated/unwise as they've appeared to many engineers for a while.
I met Sean Goedecke for lunch a few weeks ago, who uses LLMs a bunch, and is clearly a serious adult, but half the folks being shoved in front of everyone are behaving totally manic and people are cheering them on. Absolutely blows my mind to watch.
That was very weird. In the post where he was arguably "shilling," he seems to have signposted pretty well that it was dumb, but he will take the money they offered:
> $GAS is not equity and does not give you any ownership interest in Gas Town or my work. This post is for informational purposes only and is not a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any token. Crypto markets are volatile and speculative — do not risk money you can’t afford to lose.
...
> Note: The next few sections are about online gambling in all its forms, where “investing” is the buy-and-hold long-form “acceptable” form of gambling because it’s tied to world GDP growth. Cryptocurrencies are subject to wild swings and spikes, and the currency tied to Gas Town is on a wild swing up. But it’s still gambling, and this stuff is only for people who are into that… which is not me, and should probably not be you either.
In the next post he said he wasn't going to shill it any more, and then the price collapsed and people sent him death threats on Twitter. It probably would have collapsed anyway. Perhaps there was supposedly some implicit bargain that he shouldn't take the money if he wasn't going to shill? Well, there's certainly no rule saying you have to do that.
I think he's not very much to blame for taking the money from degenerate gamblers, and the cryptocurrency idiots are mostly to blame for their own mistakes.
> I think he's not very much to blame for taking the money from degenerate gamblers, and the cryptocurrency idiots are mostly to blame for their own mistakes.
I empathize with the disdain for crypto idiots, but I still think the people running or promoting these scams deserve most of the blame. "There's a market for my poison" is every dopamine dealer's excuse.
“Degenerate gamblers” is the kind of stigma that stops people and their families getting help for addiction. Even if you believe it’s a moral failing, the families deserve better.
Very true. Although, I wonder how much of that sort of thing was going on in this case? Did people actually bet money they couldn't afford to lose on this crazy scheme?
No harsh belittling is what makes them quit, not accommodating their nonsense and excusing it. There should be a stigma with destructive behavior. The flaw is this decades-long trend of talking about stigmas and refusing to condemn bad behaviors.
I’m afraid we tried that for quite a few centuries, with very little effect. Infact most major world religions had phases with heavy punishment, condemnation, belittling, and you are going to hell stuff over gambling. Yet here we are.
> I think he's not very much to blame for taking the money from degenerate gamblers, and the cryptocurrency idiots are mostly to blame for their own mistakes.
So drug dealers are not to blame for taking the money from degenerate addicts! Let's free everyone and disband the DEA, we'll save billions of dollars.
Oh wait nvm this line of thinking only applies to sv people
Yegge wrote in his blog post (viewed by many who ended up buying in) that it is an investment and that he wishes the investors will become "filthy rich". He wrote the post as an introduction to the concept of BAGS for an audience that is unfamiliar with it. He onboarded people to the platform and to his pump and dump scheme (in which he pumped, and dumped, then announced he's walking away from it).
You left out that part of the post and only mentioned the disclaimer he added at the top after he got pushback on his messaging. Are you influenced by his celebrity?
Maybe I'd care about his opinion if he didn't take the money. I consider this worse than OSS taking VC money. At least those don't have a scam auto-builtin to the structure beyond normal capitalistic parasitism.
Also, 275k lines for a markdown todo app. Anyone defending this is an idiot. I'll just say that. Go ahead, defend it. Go do a code review on `beads`. Don't say it's alright, but gastown is madness. He fucking sucks.
At my first job, all the applications the data people developed were compulsorily evaluated through Fortify (I assume this is HP Fortify) and to this day I have no idea what the security team was actually doing with the product, or what the product does. All I know is that they never changed anything even though we were mostly fresh grads and were certainly shipping total garbage.
It's like, when you say agents will largely be relegated to "triage" --- well, a pretty surprising amount of nuts and bolts infosec work is basically just triage!
Beck was in Melbourne a few weeks ago, and his take on LLM usage was so far divorced from what Yegge is doing that their views on what LLMs are capable of in early 2026 are irreconcilable.
He was the keynote at YOW! so I can't capture all the nuance and hope I'm not doing him a disservice with my interpretation, but the tl;dr is he:
"LLMs drastically decrease the cost of experimenting during the very earliest phases of a project, like when you're trying to figure out if the thing is even worth building or a specific approach might yield improvements, but loses efficacy once you're past those stages. You can keep using LLMs sustainably with a very tight loop of telling it to do the thing the cleaning up the results immediately, via human judgement."
I.e, I don't think he can relate at all to the experience of letting them run wild and getting a good result.
