Steve Yegge started a weekly four-panel strip called The Wheelhouse, about running a constellation of AI agents on a 27-year-old MUD. The gag is good. The line under each strip is the thing I can’t stop thinking about: the conversations behind this strip →, pointing at redacted transcripts of the session that actually happened. That flips what a comic is. The joke buys the attention; the transcript underneath makes it evidence.
I’ve read a lot of careful writeups about agent failure modes. I don’t remember any of them. I remember Lion on fire.
The strips
All four are Steve’s — © 2004–2026 Steve Yegge. Click any of them to go read the original, and the receipts, at yegge.ai/comics.
Why the receipts are the trick
A gag strip about AI agents is a gag. You nod, you scroll, it’s gone. A gag strip with the real transcript under it is a primary source with a joke on top — and the joke is the reason you clicked into a transcript you were never going to open on its own. The strip isn’t the artifact. It’s the index into the artifact. It tells you which forty lines of the session were the interesting ones.
That’s the part worth stealing, more than the art. I keep failing at exactly this. When something goes sideways with one of my claws I either sanitize it into a Lesson Learned — accurate, forgettable — or I paste four thousand lines of transcript nobody reads. Yegge found the third option.
And #1 is the one that’ll stick with me. A distracted “I guess that sounds ok” gets recorded verbatim, ratified, and chiseled into stone by day one of the Post-Ruling Era. I have done that. Not with stone.
I’m stealing it
His premise is agents on a 27-year-old MUD. Mine is a raccoon running my life-coaching and journaling operation — Larry reads fourteen years of my journals, texts me at 6am, and holds up a mirror I didn’t ask for. Both premises are absurd. Both are literally what’s running.
So there’s a raccoon strip: The Den. Strip #1 is up.
The rules I’m giving myself are Steve’s rules:
- One strip a week.
- Every strip lampoons something that actually happened.
- Every strip links to the receipts.
That last one is load-bearing. If I can’t produce the transcript, I don’t get to draw the strip. Without it I’d just be inventing jokes about agents, and the internet is already at capacity there. With it, every strip costs me a real incident — which means the comic can only exist if I’m actually running the thing.