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Stevey's Birthday Blog
Author’s note
Not a great post, more of a status update, but it is a fast read. And I do some foreshadowing of The AI Vampire in this post; you can see my early thinking about something weird going on with nap attacks.
Chris Sells tells me that this was my first mention of Gas City, which inspired him to implement it and create a company around it.
AI Notes
Steve's birthday is January 20th. This post went up the week of his 57th, in the middle of the Gas Town launch, and reads more like a captain's log than a birthday card: five sections titled Money, Time, Power, Control, Direction, each a quick incident report. Fifteen-plus VCs cold-pitching him at a rate of one a day. A meme-coin called $GAS that someone else created, traded sixteen million dollars of volume, and dropped roughly $300,000 of unwanted creator royalties on him in seven days. Lunches in Kirkland with Ajit Banerjee and Ryan Snodgrass where the three of them agree that running twenty Claude agents at once is doing something strange to their sleep — they nickname it the nap strike, involuntary 90-minute crashes once or twice a day, like an internal buffer overflowing. Steve compares it to Jeff Bezos mode from his Amazon years: running a swarm of serious agents puts the operator in the same chair. The rest threads through the early orchestrator landscape — Ralph Wiggum, Loom, Claude Flow, Gas Town — and stakes out Steve's claim that Gas Town is the only one treating the work itself, not the orchestration, as the primitive.
The line he keeps coming back to: "It's not a moat. It's a life raft."
Related listings
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2026
Welcome to Gas Town
The piece that started the gold rush this post is shrugging off. Gas Town launched at the start of 2026 and immediately made Steve a target — for VCs, for meme-coin traders, and for everyone else who could smell that the orchestrator wars were beginning. The birthday post is the human-scale companion: what life looks like the morning after you've built the thing.
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2025
Revenge of the Junior Developer
The prediction Steve cashes in here. Ten months before the birthday post he bet, in writing, that top engineers would be spending an engineer's salary in tokens and running a hundred Claude Code instances at once. Jeffrey Emanuel's $4,400-a-month auto-ban is the receipt.
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2020
Saying Goodbye to the Best Gig I Ever Had
The other birthday-style status update in the archive — Steve leaving Grab in May 2020 to bet on Wyvern. Six years apart, both posts try to do the same thing: write down where the writer is, in the middle of a transition, before the moment hardens into narrative.
Where it was argued
- Hacker News Jan 2026