The Shape of Things to Come, Part 1: The Continuous Thunderdome — Steve Yegge

Steve Yegge shares a detailed field report from running a fleet of AI coding agents on his 30-year-old MMO, Wyvern, using a custom orchestration harness called Wheelhouse. He explains the 'loops and graphs' concept for long-running agent workflows, powered by Beads (an issue tracker and knowledge graph) and a rotation of Claude Max accounts to sustain ~$87k/month of token usage at ~$2800 out of pocket. The post covers his multi-tier agent architecture (crew agents using Claude Fable 5, fleet workers using Opus 5, and standing role agents for production ops), then makes bold predictions: human code review will be dead within a year, CI/CD as we know it will be replaced by a 'Land Rush' / Thunderdome approach where all commits are smashed to main and agents do swarm diagnosis instead of bisection, and a 'Wish Factory' model (where users file issues that agents implement automatically) will become widespread. He argues that bespoke, organically grown agentic harnesses are inevitable and architecturally convergent — everyone will end up building something shaped like what he built.