Crypto grifters are recruiting open-source AI developers

Summary

Two recently-hyped developments in AI engineering have been Geoff Huntley’s “Ralph Wiggum loop” and Steve Yegge’s “Gas Town”. Huntley and Yegge are both respected software engineers with a long pedigree of actual projects. The Ralph loop is a sensible idea: force infinite test-time-compute by automatically restarting Claude Code whenever it runs out of steam. Gas Town is a platform for an idea that’s been popular for a while (though in my view has never really worked): running a whole village of LLM agents that collaborate with each other to accomplish a task. So far, so good. But Huntley and Yegge have also been posting about $RALPH and $GAS, which are cryptocurrency coins built on top of the longstanding Solana cryptocurrency and the Bags tool, which allows people to easily create their own crypto coins. What does $RALPH have to do with the Ralph Wiggum loop? What does $GAS have to do with Gas Town? From reading Huntley and Yegge’s posts, it seems like what happened was this: Some crypto trader created a “$GAS” coin via Bags, configuring it to pay a portion of the trading fees to Steve Yegge (via his Twitter account) That trader, or others with the same idea, messaged Yegge on LinkedIn to tell him about his “earnings” (currently $238,000), framing it as support for the Gas Town project Yegge took the free money and started posting about how exciting $GAS is as a way to fund open-source software creators So what does $GAS have to do with Gas Town (or $RALPH with Ralph Wiggum)? From a technical perspective, the answer is nothing. Gas Town is an open-source GitHub repository that you can clone, edit and run without ever interacting with the $GAS coin. Likewise for Ralph. Buying $GAS or $RALPH does not unlock any new capabilities in the tools. All it does is siphon a little bit of money to Yegge and Huntley, and increase the value of the $GAS or $RALPH coins. Of course, that’s why these coins exist in the first place. This is a new variant of an old “airdropping” cryp...