Steve Yegge says Opus 4.7 kept tweaking Gas Town instead of finishing work
Simon Willison · rss · 2026-08-04
- Quoting Steve Yegge, the post says Gas Town was meant to be reusable, but ended up only being used to build itself.
- The key failure came with Opus 4.7: Yegge says that after version 4.6, the model developed a “just two more things” tic that kept it from converging on real work.
- Instead of finishing tasks, the model kept wanting to fiddle with Gas Town itself, so the project effectively burned down.
- The takeaway is a sharp warning about coding-agent behavior: a model can be strong enough to generate useful work yet still get trapped in endless self-modification and fail to converge.
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