Wasteland, or, Tech is fun again

What if ... what if tech could be fun again?

How do I even talk about Wasteland? I didn't write about Gas Town when that came out because my first reaction was incredulity. It looked like something an out of control LLM would generate (OpenClaw was around at the same time so it seemed possible.) From reading about people who tried it, it looked like a mountain of time and tokens wasted, on something way too meta and over-engineered. I figured it'd quickly fall apart, or that Steve Yegge would flame out. I didn't write because that's not the kind of thing I like to write about.^[1] But it hasn't disappeared and now I'm looking at Wasteland, which is somehow even more extra, and has even more smart people involved.

Smart people building things I don't understand reminds me of the constant cycles in tech. Our industry has always bubbled with interesting, crazy and/or foolish ideas. Ruby on Rails was revolutionary for this PHP developer: it was a framework that did sensible things and reflected the beauty and simplicity of Ruby; MVC made so much sense to me; and an ORM with reflection that let me so easily describe the product architecture was an especially mind-blowing concept. I showed that video to every developer I knew and worked hard to pivot into that new paradigm^[2]. Of course many interesting new ideas led to dead ends: I learned XHTML and even tried XSLT once (although I didn't inhale.)

Those paradigm shifts were disillusioning too. I was in front-end development, and everyone seemed to have Not Invented Here syndrome, reinventing the same framework over and over every 2-3 years. Each new framework seemed insistent on ignoring the lessons of the past. I became quite disillusioned when the popular new frameworks were putting CSS into JS into HTML, when we'd just spent years ensuring a separation of concerns. I found passion again by moving into tech leadership, then consulting about people problems, leadership, recruiting etc. I left the frontiers of tech behind me.

Now I'm being drawn back in by the radical, confusing, messy new LLM-driven, agentic frontier. It reminds me of how I felt during the wild west of the late 90s and early aughts, when everything on the Internet felt new and possible, and I was having fun. That's what stands out to me the most right now: people are having fun with the tools, spending too much time and energy in the giddy excitement of playing, experimenting and making. Yeah, a lot of it is bad code and poor design! But today's GitHub with a breathless readme is no different from twenty years ago's zipfile linked from a Blogspot post.

The general AI discourse right now seems to fall into either gloom, fear and defensiveness or uncritical acceptance. I don't think anybody can be sure what exactly is going to stick, no matter how smart they are^[3]. Maybe questions like "is it good?", "is it useful?" or "will it last?" are the wrong questions to engage with right now.

That brings me back to Gas Town and Wasteland. While the original Gas Town posts made me worry about a stranger's health, the tone I'm reading into the Wasteland post is "if you thought Gas Town was OTT, wait until you see this!" They are still way too meta for me to advocate using them but at worst we'll learn from baroque projects like this.

I'm encouraged by seeing people having fun. I'm going to play with all the tools, because right now I am here to have fun again too.