Live with Tim O’Reilly: A Conversation with Computer Programmer Steve Yegge

In his 40+ years in the tech industry, Steve Yegge’s worn a number of software engineering hats at Geoworks, Amazon, Google, Grab, and Sourcegraph. Lately, he’s been exploring the limits of vibe coding with projects like Beads, his coding agent memory system, and Gas Town, a proof-of-concept agent orchestrator so complicated, expensive, and chaotic that Steve warned those interested NOT to use it.

So Steve’s clearly looking to the future. He joins Tim for this episode to share his thoughts on what “Software 3.0” is going to look like—and what role human coders will play in creating it. In a recent post on Medium, Steve laid out his overarching thesis: “Software tends to survive if it saves cognition.” In a world where compute (and by extension, the energy that powers it) is the bottleneck, he argues that “if a tool saves AIs tokens, it has a high chance of being used and surviving. And tools that don’t save tokens will gradually be phased out.” Steve and Tim will talk through some of the levers companies have at their disposal to manage token use (including perhaps Agent Skills) as well as other important considerations for the agentic coding future, like making sure agents can easily find and use your tool. Could it really all come down to good documentation and advertising?

And then there’s what Steve calls “the human coefficient”: the value “derive[d] from human curation, social proof, creativity, physical presence, approval, whatever.” Steve and Tim will get into the ways human-created software may work alongside—and even compete with—AI code (and where this leaves software devs today). As always, our talk will be guided by your questions and comments, whether about Beads, Gas Town and agent orchestrators, predictions for the tech industry at large, or what makes Steve hopeful about the future. We hope you join us.

Recommended prep or follow-up:

• Listen to Generative AI in the Real World: Vibe Coding with Steve Yegge (podcast)
• Read “Software Survival 3.0” (Medium post)