Top all-time · #333
Steve Yegge
Personal blog · steve-yegge.medium.comprogrammingai
Steve Yegge's personal blog at steve-yegge.medium.com covers programming and ai. Since 2021, 156 different Hacker News readers have linked it 189 times, most often “Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You (2020)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 9 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Steve Yegge's posts mainly for his Google Cloud deprecation rant, which they cite as the classic on Google's deprecations, and for his writing on agentic coding such as Gas Town.
- Recommended for · 9 comments
- Called his blog 'amusing', one post 'excellent' and another a 'classic'; 'always fantastic'; 'prescient'; 'said it better'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You (2020)37 people · 46 mentions · first linked 2021-03-25
- Welcome to Gas Town30 people · 32 mentions · first linked 2026-01-01
- Bags and the Creator Ecomony11 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2026-01-15
- The Anthropic Hive Mind9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2026-02-06
- I left Google to join Grab (2018)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-03-26
- Vibe Maintainer7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2026-03-31
- Hurricane China: How to prepare6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-03-05
- Beads: A coding agent memory system5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-10-13
- Six New Tips for Better Coding with Agents5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-12-07
- The Death of the Stubborn Developer5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-12-10
What Hacker News says?
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec... makes exactly this argument.
Comment linking /dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc
on “Google is shutting down Stadia”Submitted Hurricane China: How to prepare as a story · 47 points
HN discussionIn my experience, the issue isn't that Google will jack up the costs but that they'll deprecate their infrastructure and push the migration work onto you, often forcing you to reimplement major features.[0] One notable example is how their NDB client library used to automatically handle memcache for you, but they got rid of that with Cloud NDB Library and forced clients to implement their own caching. The sequence o…
Comment linking /dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc
on “The architecture behind a one-person tech startup”Submitted Beads: A coding agent memory system as a story · 19 points
HN discussionI think it was more of this one applicable? https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec... They don't give a shit. You can use Argon on Pro but not that pro and no not on that app which we depreciated but on this new app which will be depreciate before you can install it. It honestly is really hard to figure out what to use and where. It shouldn't be. A pro plan is a pro plan. It doesn't matter if y…
Comment linking /dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc
on “Gemini 4 Carbon”Submitted Get That Job at Grab as a story · 17 points
HN discussionhttps://steve-yegge.medium.com/ His old blog is also amusing: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Welcome to Gas City as a story · 15 points
HN discussion> But now you also have to maintain them. In my experience it is less work than keeping up with cloud provider's changes [1]. You can stay with a version of Kafka for 10 years if it meets your requirements. When you use a cloud provider's equivalent service you have to keep up with their changes, price increases and obsolescence. You are at their mercy. I am not saying it is always better to set up your own equivale…
Comment linking /dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc
on “Kubernetes is our generation's Multics”Submitted The Death of the Stubborn Developer as a story · 13 points
HN discussionWith Cloud, as long as you don't mind solving the same problem multiple times every few years when things you depend on go obsolete, indeed it is a nice experience. A lot of people do mind. I won't belabor the point; Steve Yegge said it better[0]. I think some progress has been made on this front, particularly with bigger customers; but even if Google promised decades of backward compatibility tomorrow, Google's rep…
Comment linking /dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc
on “Mourning Google”Submitted The Flat Curve Society as a story · 12 points
HN discussionGoogle's habit of shutting stuff down on people's faces is a reason why many of their services are being ignored by a lot of people. So much that it is hurting them even in the cloud even when they promise that they wont 'deprecate' so much stuff. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
Comment linking /dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc
on “Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down”Submitted Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0 as a story · 12 points
HN discussionSo Google is bringing the deprecation treadmill to the web, yay! Yegge called it: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec... """ > Because I sometimes get similar letters from the Google Cloud Platform. They look like this: >> Dear Google Cloud Platform User, >> We are writing to remind you that we are sunsetting [Important Service you are using] as of August 2020, after which you will not be ab…
Comment linking /dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc
on “"Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec"”Submitted Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns as a story · 10 points
HN discussionYou should read Gas Town: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d... There are people out there building AI building orchestrators for orchestrators for orchestrators for agents. The author of that blog post later claimed to be spending the equivalent of $122k/month on tokens (by rotating their usage between 21 accounts). As far as I can tell, the only thing that this level of spend has produced…
Comment linking /welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04
on “Meta and Microsoft take steps to reduce employee usage of Claude AI”Submitted Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You (2020) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionHerdr is truly awesome. Game changing almost. If you think of all the overly complex agent setups[1] and overly complex software factories[2] to write code... herdr and a pick-your-coding-agent replaces all that with a very simple one thing which just works. There are many ways to do what herdr does, like tmux, and rex, but in a nutshell: You launch cli things (claude code, cli tools etc) anywhere inside a herdr pro…
Comment linking /welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04
on “Herdr has released native app”Submitted Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You (2020) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionDodged a bullet there, I'd say. You can safely assume that google will EOL anything in GCP that you might actually start relying on for business function. "Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You": https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
Comment linking /dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc
on “It's tough being an Azure fan”Submitted Welcome to Gas City as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe phrase I've found useful is Yegge's "Crystalized Cognition" https://steve-yegge.medium.com/software-survival-3-0-97a2a62... Claude can 100% build you your own basecamp quickly, but there is a lot of good thinking that has gone into a product. Edge cases. Integrations. Clarity of thinking and ways to extend it. Agents love standing on the shoulders of good crystalized cognition (grep, curl etc), but I think that…
Comment linking /software-survival-3-0-97a2a6255f7b
on “What About Rails?”Submitted Beads: A coding agent memory system by Steve Yegge as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYeah that's a good point and the sibling comment seems to be pointing in the same direction. You could take a look at Steve Yegge's beads ( https://steve-yegge.medium.com/introducing-beads-a-coding-ag... , https://github.com/steveyegge/beads ) but the writeup is not super detailed. I think your last point is pretty important, that all that we see is done by experienced people, and that today we don't have a good way…
Comment linking /introducing-beads-a-coding-agent-memory-system-637d7d92514a
on “Why the push for Agentic when models can barely follow a simple instruction?”Submitted The Death of the Stubborn Developer as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> I’m aware that no matter what I write here, I’m going to sound like yet another startup nerd talking about “the future of programming” before announcing that I’ve joined, like, Sri Lanka’s answer to Uber or something. Hah, shots fired! https://steve-yegge.medium.com/why-i-left-google-to-join-gra... (Which to be fair was a prescient critique of Google too.)
Comment linking /why-i-left-google-to-join-grab-86dfffc0be84
on “What even is an OS now?”Submitted The Flat Curve Society as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou've misunderstood; the quoted line from the post is most likely subtweeting Steve Yegge (in particular https://steve-yegge.medium.com/why-i-left-google-to-join-gra... ).
Comment linking /why-i-left-google-to-join-grab-86dfffc0be84/
on “What even is an OS now?”Submitted Vibe Maintainer as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
