Inspired by Yegge's Gastown and Neal.fun's Space Elevator, I created the ai elevator!
$ x1
웃 x1
Ground floor: website, prompting, conversational.
You login to chatgpt, copilot or claude.ai. You talk to your AI and engage in copy-pasting. You are productive.
$ x1
웃 x1
You are using a tool (VSCode perhaps) and are conversational with an AI model - you choose Sonnet 4.6, or Codex 5.3. You are in a dialog with an AI. You are writing code, it is writing code.
$ x2
웃 x2
You are learning some of the commands inside of an editor. You use "Plan" mode. The Editor is modifying code on your behalf and you are pressing "yes, this one time", or "yes, for all of this session".
You can get into a flow state and be extremely productive. You are writing less code. You are still in a conversation with an AI. You can start to create longer form requirements but you generally are in a back-and-forth with the AI.
$ x2
웃 x2
You have moved from converstaions to "one shots". You can use more commands inside the editor that make the AI understand preset rules about what you like and want.
You are writing less code, you are gaining an understanding in taste and expectations on outcomes from a given model. You are changing models every week.
$ x2
웃 x2
You switch back and forth from an editor to a terminal. You are storing your rules in markdown files and auto-loading them into the session.
$ x4
웃 x2
You start running more than 1 session at a time. You are talking to other engineers about how they use AGENTs. and you are sharing your git repositories with your colleagues.
$ x8
웃 x3
You discover and start experimenting with beads. Your one-shots are beginning to migrate towards breakdowns expressed as epics, tasks etc. in beads. You are driving an agent to use beads conversationally.
$ x16
웃 x3
It is normal for you to to be working via tools that are doing the work for you. You are less and less conversational during the creation of code, you are more conversational in the creation of requirements, architecture and decomposition. You have an emerging repeatable system for automation, rigour, verification.
$ x64
웃 x4
You have transitioned to specifications that generate beads that generate work. You are comfortable letting the agent run over beads. You have created your own oneshots and frameworks that ralph wiggum your requirement. You know who ralph wiggum is.
$ x128
웃 x4
You think about verification and are accepting of hallucinations as a core feature.
You are running multiple agents over beads.
You are gastown-curious.
You are considering councils and consensus.
$ x16.384
웃 x0.5
You are writing your own beads and/or gastown.