The Shape of Things to Come

August 2026 · yegge.ai The Shape of Things to Come Part 1: The Continuous Thunderdome Today we're going to explain the "loops and graphs" thing, and I'll show you how to get your coding agent to work all night on massive problems while you snore peacefully. Then we're going to look at what happens to harnesses once you solve those problems. They either devolve into chaos, or they evolve into cities. Done properly, civilization emerges, right there in your project. We're going to learn the basics, and then we will explore how to build your cities with some taste and class, in a way that makes them good for their citizens to inhabit. We'll explore a new harness I've been building, called Wheelhouse. It is closed-source, made just for me. I have given up on building reusable harnesses. Indeed I believe harnesses will all soon be bespoke, and the people trying to sell you one will all soon be bebroke. Harnesses need to be part of your application, chemically bonded in. You won't have any luck with someone else's "reusable" harness framework. You don't need it. Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw. Since Claude Fable 5 dropped, I have returned full-time to my 30-year-old video game, Wyvern, which I began work on in 1996, and launched in 2001. I had been waiting for a model smart enough to help me with my game, and now that it's here, Wyvern's once again my main squeeze. On the side I do occasional six-figure gigs where I fly to companies and teach them my techniques, and that helps with my (considerable) token bills. But aside from those few paid field trips, I am laser-focused on my game, seven days a week. Wyvern's time will finally come next year. I have officially entered Sam Altman's solo unicorn contest. Wyvern's React web client, 2026. Rhialto is chatting with Pado's alt char in the pirate town of Stensele. The game was ultra bit-rotted, despite still running today with paying players. (Once you're hooked on Wyvern, you're hooked for life. I have whales that have spent thousands on it.) I have slowly been using Fable to bring it back to its former glory. I had a 100-year work backlog when I quit Wyvern development again in 2022, and Fable has already worked its way through over half of it. Opus could not (and still cannot) understand Wyvern, but Fable wields my code base like a sword. It's still just a sword, though, and we're trying to build a city. Someone from Anthropic asked me recently what I would do once Fable can write everything for me. On reflection, it was the silliest question I've been asked in many years, and I'm still surprised that someone from Anthropic could think any model could just "write everything." Making a halfway decent MMO takes many tens of thousands of Fable sessions, throughout which you must display intense focus, dedication, and no small amount of taste. And Fable still can't do the content half: artwork, maps, lore, storylines. All of today's models, including the best image generators, produce GPT 3-era slop for all my content, which the players immediately reject. But I can tell you this: once a model arrives with some Wyvern-y taste, we will still have tens of thousands of sessi