Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

avaer

TBH this post still reads like a clown show.

giancarlostoro

I loved Beads, but kept running into issues because it is so git heavy. One: not every system and project I work on uses git. Two: Sometimes I'd switch branches, and that would screw up Beads state entirely. Three: And this is at least last I used it, there's no safety net, Claude would close a Bead, without validating anything. I wound up building my own with Claude, I made it SQLite first, syncs to GitHub, can pull down from GitHub, and I added "Gates" to stopgap Claude or whatever agent from marking things complete if they've not been: compiled, unit tests run, or simple human testing / confirmation. The Gates concept improved my experience with Claude, all too often it says it finished something, when in fact it did not. Every task must have a gate, and gates must pass before you can close a task. Gates can be reused across tasks, so if "Run unit tests" is one gate, you can reuse it for every task, when it passes, it passes for that one task <-> gate combination. Anyway, I'm happy for Beads, Gas Town not so much my wheelhouse on the other hand.

mmastrac

Serious question - there's a lot of fluff talking about Gas Town, but has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting? At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.

solomatov

Does anyone has any tips for starting with Gastown? I am comfortable with couple of agents running, but not yet comfortable with what Gastown offers.

bayarearefugee

> But no need to wait. At a high level, Gas City is the answer to all your problems. Ha! At least, for certain classes of problem, such as, “How can I bring AI into my company and pass an audit trail,” The important audit at my company is conducted by the FDA. I have a feeling when they ask what processes we followed to mitigate any user harm that could be caused by software changes that "I told an AI-mayor in the form of a cartoon fox what to do and he spit out a bunch of vibecode software written by AI-driven virtual cartoon characters" is not among the answers they want to hear.

ncruces

The original Beads, it seems, used my CGO-free SQLite driver. Seems like I'm back to obscurity. :)

pianopatrick

I searched on google about the cost of running Gas Town. The Gemini AI response claimed Gas town costs $100 / hour and can spit out 4000 lines of code per hour, so Gas Town costs 2.5 cents per line of code. I tried tracking down where those numbers came from and the sources were a bit sketchy. Can anybody who has used Gas Town confirm those numbers, or report their personal numbers?

throw1234567891

Does this support OpenAI-compatible APIs? Or is it only clowncode, codex and copilot? Love to try it but without OpenAI-compatible APIs it is junk.

vessenes

Nice timing. I was just noting that beads in an old repo, just ... worked. Updates worked, I didn't have super weird errors to track down... I was like "nice!" Beads bumping to 1.0 is great. I haven't used gas town in a month or so, but a stable gas town sounds very valuable. I think Yegge's instincts that making a programmable / editable coordination layer (he calls this gas city) is a great idea. Gas town early days was definitely a wild experience in terms of needing to watch carefully lest your system be destroyed, and then I put that energy into OpenClaw - I'll probably spin up Gas City and see what it can do soon though. Very cool.

cdrnsf

An apt name for something doing it's part to spike energy consumption and accelerate the climate crisis.

sailingparrot

Gas Town really feels not just vibe coded but also vibe designed. I looked into it, to see whether multi agent setups really made a difference, the entire design philosophy feels like it was « let’s add one more layer of agent and surely this time it will work » about 10 times in a row. So now you have agents of type mayor, polecats, witnesses, deacons, dogs etc plus a slew of Unneeded constructs with incomprehensible names. In one of the blog post for gas town I remember reading something by the author along the lines of « it’s super inefficient, but because you burn so many tokens, you still get what you want at the end! » clearly this is also the design philosophy behind this project, just (get your ai to) throw more random abstractions and more agent types until you feel like it kinda works, don’t bother asking yourself if they actually contribute anything. This gave me the very clear feeling that most of the complexity of gas town is absolutely not needed and probably detrimental. Ended up building my own thing that is 10x simpler, just a simple main agent you talk to, that can dispatch subagents, they all communicate, wake each other up and keep track of work through a simple CLI. No « refinery » or « wasteland » or « molecule » or « convoys » or « deacons » or …

dbbk

I tried Beads and it kept breaking in such frustratingly random ways that I just added a Linear MCP server and called it a day. That's really all you need.

munificent

> I’ve been saying since last year that by the end of 2026, people will be mostly programming by talking to a face. There’s absolutely NO reason to type with the Mayor. You should be able to chat with them like a person. You’ll have a cartoon fox there onscreen, in costume, building and managing your production software, and showing you pretty status updates whenever you ask for one. This is the end state for IDEs. This is a desirable end state for highly social but perhaps slightly sociopathic extroverts who want to spend all day talking even though they aren't talking to a person. For anyone else, it's hard to imagine considering that a desirable way to spend eight hours a day.

0xbadcafebee

Beads is cool, but I tried to use it, and the backend didn't really make sense. I have to run an sql database in the background? How does it sync with Git? (I didn't see any files/objects committed to the repo) Plus, Dolt ended up using a constant 3-30kB/s of i/o in the background, while nothing was actually going on. That and Beads has a lot of features I'm not gonna use. All of this was just too complicated for my tiny brain. So I slapped together my own Beads implementation ( https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/dingles ) over a day or two. Probably has bugs, and I'm sure race conditions if you tried to use with Gas Town, and likely does not scale. But it has the minimum functionality needed to create and track issues and sync them (locally and remotely, either via normal merge, or a dedicated ticket branch). No SQL, no extra features, just JSONL and Git. Threw a whole large software project at it, and the AI took to it like a duck to water, used it to make epics for the whole project, methodically worked through them all, dependencies first, across multiple context sessions. The paradigm of making tools the AI wants to use is clearly a winner.

pron

Does Yegge really think that building production software this way is a good idea? Let's assume that managing context well is a problem and that this kind of orchestration solves it. But I see another problem with agents: When designing a system or a component we have ideas that form invariants. Sometimes the invariant is big, like a certain grand architecture, and sometimes it's small, like the selection of a data structure. Eventually, though, you want to add a feature that clashes with that invariant. At that point there are usually three choices: * Don't add the feature. The invariant is a useful simplifying principle and it's more important than the feature; it will pay dividends in other ways. * Add the feature inelegantly or inefficiently on top of the invariant. Hey, not every feature has to be elegant or efficient. * Go back and change the invariant. You've just learnt something new that you hadn't considered and puts things in a new light, and it turns out there's a better approach. Often, only one of these is right. Usually, one of these is very, very wrong, and with bad consequences. But picking among them isn't a matter of context. It's a matter of judgment and the models - not the harnesses - get this judgment wrong far too often (they go with what they know - the "average" of their training - or they just don't get it). So often, in fact, that mistakes quickly accumulate and compound, and after a few bad decisions like this the codebase is unsalvageable. Today's models are just not good enough (yet) to create a complete sustainable product on their own. You just can't trust them to make wise decisions. Study after study and experiement after experiment show this. Now, perhaps we make better judgment calls because we have context that the agent doesn't. But we can't really dump everything we know, from facts to lessons, and that pertains to every abstraction layer of the software, into documents. Even if we could, today's models couldn't handle them. So even if it is a matter of context, it is not something that can be solved with better context management . Having an audit trail is nice, but not if it's a trail of one bad decision after another.

siliconc0w

My experience is that Agentic Coding can legitimately get you mostly-working software. You do, however, still need to spend a few days groking, validating, and usually nudging/whacking it to conform to the shape you intended vs what the agent inferred. It is pretty magical to go from brainstorming an idea in the evening, having ChatGPT Pro spit out a long list of beads to implement it, leaving it running over night in a totally empty repo and waking up to a mostly-implemented project.

iwontberude

I really need to huff more chemicals to keep up with the state of this insane type of engineering

phpnode

I'm pretty excited about agentic coding myself, but this does appear to be an extended ai-psychosis (i'm not super comfortable with this phrase, but it is becoming pretty recognisable). I think he's boxed himself in by continually layering more complexity on his approach, rather than stepping back and questioning the fundamentals or the overall direction. All of the steps Gas Town or Gas City etc are taking are towards reducing human oversight and control. This is profoundly misguided! In a world of infinite cheap software it is precisely this human decision making and control that matters. > There will be nothing like it. You are going to want to use Gas City. No. I do not want to talk to the mayor of my software factory, as its cartoonish minions build an infinite mountain of slop. Unreviewable, both in terms of code and the finished product. Instead, I want to precisely capture human ideas, have those ideas questioned, challenged, improved, and then I want to bring those ideas to life, keeping the human in the loop whenever they want. Neither Beads, Gas Town, nor Gas City or anything like them are required for that.

coldtea

Beads is needlessly overengineered. Puts me off from checking Gas Town.

_doctor_love

I'm a long-time Steve Yegge fan but a major Gas Town hater (now Gas City too, I guess). It's doubling down on all the wrong metaphors. I also simply detest how Gas Town is modeled fundamentally on an extractive and destructive metaphor, the 19th century factory. I want to live in a verdant software garden, not a dystopian industrialist hellscape. In my view the StrongDM guys are on the right long-term path.