Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

> 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.

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.

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 …

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.

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.

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.

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?

The original Beads, it seems, used my CGO-free SQLite driver.

Seems like I'm back to obscurity.

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

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.

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.

TBH this post still reads like a clown show.

Yegge is a snake oil salesman

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.

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.

I've been using Beads for 5 different projects, and Beads and/or Dolt failures have been a regular thing. It's own "doctor" feature is sort of disturbing, in that it (1) tells me that my Beads setups are always at least a little bit broken, but (2) can never fix all of the issues. Hopefully the 1.0 designation means that Steve is out of "throw shit at the wall" mode. Beads is fine as a replacement for Markdown files, but I'll never go near Gas Town because of my experience with it.

So now you have agents of type mayor, polecats, witnesses, deacons, dogs etc plus a slew of Unneeded constructs with incomprehensible names.

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 …

You won't get 10k stars and a blog post out of that. Obviously you need some Stoats who have Conferences with the Stump Lord to determine whether they are needed at the Silo or the Bilge. They'll then regroup at the appropriate Decision Epicenter and delegate to the Weasels and Chipmunks who actually do the coding (antiquated term) in the Salt Mine.

The Stump Lord is an owl.

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

The climate crisis is primarily a consequence of fossil fuels, not necessarily energy demand. I feel like its a poor conflation, despite it possibly being a truism depending on where the datacentre is based and what power source feeds it.

Anyway, I'm happy for Beads, Gas Town not so much my wheelhouse on the other hand.

The original Beads, it seems, used my CGO-free SQLite driver.

Seems like I'm back to obscurity.

The important audit at my company is conducted by the FDA.

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.

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?

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.

TBH this post still reads like a clown show.

Love this.

How did you implement gates? Are they simply tasks Claude itself has to confirm it ran, or are they scripts that run to check that the thing in question actually happened, or do they spawn a separate AI agent to check that the thing happened, or what?

You got relegated to a stack of dirty stacked up crates, according to the genAI article images.

Keep in mind investing in cartoon foxes was a "business strategy" a lot of (otherwise serious) people bought into in 2020-2021.

And those cartoon foxes didn't even do anything! I guess these ones do?

Don't put it past the masses. These are crazy times.

I did an induction at some ISO certified company some years back, reading their docs. A good 50% of them contained significant content that basically read:

> the thing must be in the place where it should be

With no further information e.g. what place, where, how, when, who facilitates that?

> the person who facilitates it, is the person who facilitates it.

Yea thanks. So their ISO accredited process was basically no process. Would have been way better with a talking fox.

So I feel like humans are capable of just as bad. I'd be interested in what answer the Fox could spit out and I kinda wonder where it might fit on the bell curve of all non Gas-Town "auditable" processes. I'm all for skepticism but I feel like it would be more tangible if we instead criticised the response instead of just conjuring it as "definitely awful" because it happens to be on top of a generated stack.

I mean: I don't want it to work, but maybe we're not as good as we think we are, or the stuff we rate as super important is actually way less important with a generated context. As much as I love good code, the thought that gnaws at the back of my head is the truism that some of the most profitable code in history has been some of the "worst" code (e.g. MySpace's janky code base ontop of ColdFusion or Twitter's "Fail Whale" era).

So I'm happy that someone is exploring this space in an open way. I'm just glad I'm not the one finding that out with my face first.

> The important audit at my company is conducted by [Trump's second term] FDA.

Could work

Not yet... but me in 2020 telling you what the HN frontpage 2026 would look like you would have sent me to a mental institution, wouldn't you?

If the post does not have any use-cases proving value then perhaps this is something yet to be validated, i.e. the burden on the users, not the creators.

you can always fire it up yourself and see what its all about. in my experience it generates a lot of code very quickly, that code is probably only ever supposed to be LLM maintained, not by people.

> Having spent six weeks or so using Gas Town across multiple simultaneous projects, I believe I can describe the shift concretely. The bottleneck migrates from coding speed to the rate at which you can generate ideas, write specifications, and validate outputs. You are no longer limited by how fast you can build. You are limited by how fast you can think.

Interesting:

> Kubernetes asks “Is it running?” Gas Town asks “Is it done?” Kubernetes optimizes for uptime. Gas Town optimizes for completion.

https://embracingenigmas.substack.com/p/exploring-gas-town

Using regular Claude code I can generate 4k lines an hour. Using some bash I can generate 4k lines of code per second.

Lines of code per hour is a bad metric.

Can it solve a problem using production quality code that doesn’t take four times as long to review? That sounds like something I would pay $100 for.

Set a budget. Fund an openrouter account with the max you can stomach spending on this test and give it a shot.

At least, that’s what I would do, if I had any interest in testing out gastown with my own money. If my employer wants to pay for the testing, that’s another question entirely.

Read some of his earlier stuff. He’s a very informal writer, but he’s a damn good one with good ideas.

Yeah but the clown show is now marked 1.0 for release.

Yegge is a snake oil salesman

Please don't post personal attacks to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

Thoughtful critique is of course fine but there's no need to be personal, and it should be something we can learn from.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If we're keeping gas and coal plants online to power this or using gas generators to power data centers, I'd consider that a wasteful contributing factor.

The Stump Lord is an owl.

Reminds me of Urbit the completely exotic computer network

You got relegated to a stack of dirty stacked up crates, according to the genAI article images.

Please don't post personal attacks to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

Thoughtful critique is of course fine but there's no need to be personal, and it should be something we can learn from.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Does the apparent rugpull on the $GAS meme coin[0] qualify?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge#Vibe_coding_and_cr...

Love this.

Keep in mind investing in cartoon foxes was a "business strategy" a lot of (otherwise serious) people bought into in 2020-2021.

And those cartoon foxes didn't even do anything! I guess these ones do?

Don't put it past the masses. These are crazy times.

> The important audit at my company is conducted by [Trump's second term] FDA.

Could work

Claude or whatever agent will get a message when it tries to close a task, which tells them which gates are not resolved yet, at which point, the agent will instinctively want to read the task. I did run into an issue where I forgot to add gates to a new project, so Claude did smoosh over by making a blanket gate, I have otherwise never had an issue when I defined what the gate is, Claude usually honors it. I havent worked on big updates recently, but I noticed other tools like rtk (Rust Token Killer) will add their own instructions to your claude's instructions.md file, so I think I need to craft one to tack on with sane instructions, including never closing tasks without having the user create gates for them first.

In a nutshell, a gate is a entry in the DB with arbitrary text, Claude is good about following whatever it is. Claude trying to close a task will force it to read it.

Life's gotten slightly busy, but you can see more on the repo. I've been debating giving it a better name, I feel like GuardRails implies security, when the goal is just to validate work slightly.

https://github.com/Giancarlos/GuardRails

I did an induction at some ISO certified company some years back, reading their docs. A good 50% of them contained significant content that basically read:

> the thing must be in the place where it should be

With no further information e.g. what place, where, how, when, who facilitates that?

> the person who facilitates it, is the person who facilitates it.

Yea thanks. So their ISO accredited process was basically no process. Would have been way better with a talking fox.

So I'm happy that someone is exploring this space in an open way. I'm just glad I'm not the one finding that out with my face first.

Which ISO certification matters, but the key thing people should be aware of is that the primary value of the certification to customers is that your processes are documented and that deviations are tracked, so that customers can check whether the processes makes sense before signing a contract. It's important not to expect the certification itself to guarantee quality.

If the post does not have any use-cases proving value then perhaps this is something yet to be validated, i.e. the burden on the users, not the creators.

Why would the onus on the value prop be on the user?

There should be no shortage of examples the creator could provide, unless of course...

In an era where creating such libraries is much cheaper than validating that they're useful or work, yeah you really should validate it before you expect someone to use it. Nobody is going around trying out every slop project they see, they'd be wasting hours and hours for no gain at all.

This all being said, I do find the idea interesting, but heeded it's advice when it said it's hideously expensive and risky to use. So yes, I do want someone braver, richer, and stupider than me to take the first leap

Corollary: if the post does have use-cases providing value, this is something yet to be validated and the value is just imagine by the author

Not yet... but me in 2020 telling you what the HN frontpage 2026 would look like you would have sent me to a mental institution, wouldn't you?

Same institution I’d send Steve today.

The sanatorium from American Horror Story Asylum comes to mind.

Dominique, nique, nique…

"every 5th article is about no-code-solutions that sometimes work" might be unexpected but it's hardly the stuff of institutionalization.

you can always fire it up yourself and see what its all about. in my experience it generates a lot of code very quickly, that code is probably only ever supposed to be LLM maintained, not by people.

Using regular Claude code I can generate 4k lines an hour. Using some bash I can generate 4k lines of code per second.

Lines of code per hour is a bad metric.

Can it solve a problem using production quality code that doesn’t take four times as long to review? That sounds like something I would pay $100 for.

Interesting:

> Kubernetes asks “Is it running?” Gas Town asks “Is it done?” Kubernetes optimizes for uptime. Gas Town optimizes for completion.

https://embracingenigmas.substack.com/p/exploring-gas-town

Set a budget. Fund an openrouter account with the max you can stomach spending on this test and give it a shot.

At least, that’s what I would do, if I had any interest in testing out gastown with my own money. If my employer wants to pay for the testing, that’s another question entirely.

I don't think the op meant Gas Town itself (if they did, my bad), but what has Yegge done with Gas Town? By now it should have released some amazing thing if Gas Town increases productivity so much.

> you can always fire it up yourself and see what its all about

I imagine it doesn't run very cheaply.

> that code is probably only ever supposed to be LLM maintained, not by people.

But LLMs are trying to mimic people. So if confusion is the human response, what's to stop the llm from acting confused?

I think the point is that we are given no real idea at all, not even some ballpark figures, about how much actual money actually needs to be spent in order to run Gas Town. The original article had some handwavy stuff about how it cost An Awful Lot, but no actual numbers.

Cost per line of code is not an amazing metric, but at least it's an attempt to come up with a figure.

(I would also be interested to find out how much it costs to run...)

Well, yes ideally we would eventually also have metrics about error rates and reject rates. Like ideally at some point someone could do a study of "for every 100 PRs Gas Town generates, how many are accepted after code review and how many are rejected" or "for every 100 lines of code Gas Town generates, how many coding errors are detected by human reviewers".

Unfortunately I think things are moving so fast that by the time such a study was done, we would already be on to newer models and newer versions of gas town.

I’m not sure I find the testimony of a Bain & Company AI consultant (https://www.bain.com/our-team/eric-koziol/) to be compelling for anything outside of generating fees.

This seems to be an AI-generated post where the "author" never reveals building any successful product or even tangible project with Gas Town.

This sounds like every LLM workflow, which is 'you tell the LLM what you want'.

The real distinction is of scale - whether you want a REST endpoint or a fully functional word processor.

But real, actual, complex software is at least half spec (either explicit, or implicitly captured by its code), the question is, can LLMs specify software to the same degree with Gas Town, that you get something functioning?

This doesn't really answer the question...?

You provided a quote from someone who seems to be an AI-boosting influencer who claimed to use it, but where's the output in the form of code we can look at, or in the form of an app someone can use today?

I'm not an AI-denier. I use LLMs and agentic coding. They increase my productivity.

...but there is still a very real problem with people claiming that some new way of using AI is earth shattering, and changes everything based on vague anecdotes that don't involve a tangible released output that they can point to.

I mean not how to do it, it's not that hard, but how to be productive with it.

Read some of his earlier stuff. He’s a very informal writer, but he’s a damn good one with good ideas.

No. He used to be good with ideas. Now he's drinking too much of his own poison. His blog posts are bloviated monstrosities incapable of coherently describing the very trivial ideas contained in them.

Reminds me of Urbit the completely exotic computer network

That's fully veered into cult territory.

If we're keeping gas and coal plants online to power this or using gas generators to power data centers, I'd consider that a wasteful contributing factor.

but we could also argue that not investing in extra non-fossil fuel capacity is the issue here. OR not investing in more research on super conductors and/or storage. Iceland could possibly export considerable amounts of renewable energy if we licked those problems.

I mean, under the same logic couldn't we kinda argue that TV has ruined the planet? A lot of energy for something of debatable physical value. OR Motor racing, football, The Olympic games? All that energy and waste just to find out who can throw a stick the furthest every four years.

Does the apparent rugpull on the $GAS meme coin[0] qualify?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge#Vibe_coding_and_cr...

In a nutshell, a gate is a entry in the DB with arbitrary text, Claude is good about following whatever it is. Claude trying to close a task will force it to read it.

Life's gotten slightly busy, but you can see more on the repo. I've been debating giving it a better name, I feel like GuardRails implies security, when the goal is just to validate work slightly.

https://github.com/Giancarlos/GuardRails

Yeah but the clown show is now marked 1.0 for release.

The description on Wikipedia looks like somebody else created a memecoin in his honor, sent him the profits, and he accepted them? And the only people harmed were people who invest in random memecoins? I don't understand the problem.

To me, no, not quite. I'll give him one free pass. More like "I'll coast on this pulled rug to see what happens" than that he did the rug pull. Not a very wise thing to do, but not malicious either.

It sounds like a gate is a prompt that shows up at the appropriate time, which works because LLM’s pay more attention to the last thing they read.

It seems like a lot of coding agent features work that way?

Who closes the gate? Is it Claude itself after it runs the verification? Who makes sure the verification did in fact run?

Corollary: if the post does have use-cases providing value, this is something yet to be validated and the value is just imagine by the author

Why would the onus on the value prop be on the user?

There should be no shortage of examples the creator could provide, unless of course...

"every 5th article is about no-code-solutions that sometimes work" might be unexpected but it's hardly the stuff of institutionalization.

> that code is probably only ever supposed to be LLM maintained, not by people.

But LLMs are trying to mimic people. So if confusion is the human response, what's to stop the llm from acting confused?

> you can always fire it up yourself and see what its all about

I imagine it doesn't run very cheaply.

Cost per line of code is not an amazing metric, but at least it's an attempt to come up with a figure.

(I would also be interested to find out how much it costs to run...)

Unfortunately I think things are moving so fast that by the time such a study was done, we would already be on to newer models and newer versions of gas town.

Same institution I’d send Steve today.

The sanatorium from American Horror Story Asylum comes to mind.

Dominique, nique, nique…

we can do better than "that man is crazy". Why not pull up a line in his OPENLY AVAILABLE CODE BASE and mock that instead?

I don't think the op meant Gas Town itself (if they did, my bad), but what has Yegge done with Gas Town? By now it should have released some amazing thing if Gas Town increases productivity so much.

I’m not sure I find the testimony of a Bain & Company AI consultant (https://www.bain.com/our-team/eric-koziol/) to be compelling for anything outside of generating fees.

That's fully veered into cult territory.

What has Yegge done with Gas Town? Well for one, he has posted a bunch of blog content about it which has generated chatter like this and increased his geek mindshare.

Just because he's operating in the realm of smart nerds doesn't mean he is immune to the value-inverting effects of social media.

I think the main thing he's produced using Gas Town is Gas Town itself.

Does this mean you would avoid an article on PostgreSQL if it's from a company selling Postgres products or consultation?

Who closes the gate? Is it Claude itself after it runs the verification? Who makes sure the verification did in fact run?

we can do better than "that man is crazy". Why not pull up a line in his OPENLY AVAILABLE CODE BASE and mock that instead?

Beads, his glorified CLI based work tracker, was over several hundred thousand lines of code, last I checked in January.

Where do I even begin to mock that except at the source? That’s just absolute insanity.

I think the main thing he's produced using Gas Town is Gas Town itself.

What has Yegge done with Gas Town? Well for one, he has posted a bunch of blog content about it which has generated chatter like this and increased his geek mindshare.

Just because he's operating in the realm of smart nerds doesn't mean he is immune to the value-inverting effects of social media.

Does this mean you would avoid an article on PostgreSQL if it's from a company selling Postgres products or consultation?

It means they'd avoid an article on the benefits of smoking if it's posted by a company selling cigarettes.

I mean not how to do it, it's not that hard, but how to be productive with it.

This sounds like every LLM workflow, which is 'you tell the LLM what you want'.

The real distinction is of scale - whether you want a REST endpoint or a fully functional word processor.

This seems to be an AI-generated post where the "author" never reveals building any successful product or even tangible project with Gas Town.

It's like Web 4.0 zombo.com

This doesn't really answer the question...?

I'm not an AI-denier. I use LLMs and agentic coding. They increase my productivity.

Yeah if this can truly just autonomously make great software, then where is all the new SaaS that is able to undercut incumbents by charging 10-20% of what they are charging?

I don't use LLMs and I never use agentic coding. And I too am interested in an answer to this question.

I suppose one could, but none of those are primary economic drivers with dim prospects for turning a profit (well, I suppose that may be true of TV).

It sounds like a gate is a prompt that shows up at the appropriate time, which works because LLM’s pay more attention to the last thing they read.

It seems like a lot of coding agent features work that way?

Beads, his glorified CLI based work tracker, was over several hundred thousand lines of code, last I checked in January.

Where do I even begin to mock that except at the source? That’s just absolute insanity.

If its all obviously shit then it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe point Claude at it and ask it to find the most stupid stuff that you can then manually verify as being wtf.

My point is that just calling him names has no substance, but mocking his source specifically does.

It means they'd avoid an article on the benefits of smoking if it's posted by a company selling cigarettes.

It's like Web 4.0 zombo.com

I suppose one could, but none of those are primary economic drivers with dim prospects for turning a profit (well, I suppose that may be true of TV).

Yeah if this can truly just autonomously make great software, then where is all the new SaaS that is able to undercut incumbents by charging 10-20% of what they are charging?

I don't use LLMs and I never use agentic coding. And I too am interested in an answer to this question.

If its all obviously shit then it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe point Claude at it and ask it to find the most stupid stuff that you can then manually verify as being wtf.

My point is that just calling him names has no substance, but mocking his source specifically does.

> If its all obviously shit then it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe point Claude at it and ask it to find stupid stuff.

What does that even mean? Am I supposed to point Claude at garbage code bases? All it will find is garbage.

> My point is that just calling him names has no substance, but mocking his source specifically does.

He is the source. He wrote this stuff under his own volition.

> If its all obviously shit then it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe point Claude at it and ask it to find stupid stuff.

What does that even mean? Am I supposed to point Claude at garbage code bases? All it will find is garbage.

> My point is that just calling him names has no substance, but mocking his source specifically does.

He is the source. He wrote this stuff under his own volition.

We're supposed to be engineers. Criticising a concept based on conjecture and insult is unbecoming of our culture.

13 min read

Apr 3, 2026

TL;DR: Gas Town and Beads have both released version 1.0.0 today. Enjoy!

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Gas Town and Beads hit v1.0.0

It has been a wild 3-month ride since I launched Gas Town.

First there was the part where I was like nooo don’t use it, and everyone was like, hold my beer. I am so glad some of you ignored me so hard. It’s just what I’d hoped for. You early adopters helped pave the way for everyone else.

And we went through some chaotic times early on. There were the serial killer sprees, viciously taking out random workers mid-job. (It’s always the Deacon, the modern-day Butler in the Gas Town murder mysteries.) There was the 22-nose Clown Show, where the Mayor scored a new clown nose every time it had massive data loss, which went on for weeks. And more. We’ve had our share of trying times, honking alert noses, piles of worker corpses. All long past us now.

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The Gas Town Serial Murders and Clown Show

Despite the early bumps, we’ve continued to enjoy absolutely massive community engagement. Even though Gas Town “only” has 13k stars (at 3 months!), it has hundreds of enthusiastic committers, and bugs get noticed and fixed fast.

It’s safe to say that Gas Town has largely been in maintenance mode since the Dolt migration finished up, and that was well over a month ago. I’ve continued to allow a few nice features here and there, but for the most part we are now directing people’s creative efforts to the successor, Gas City, which is in alpha testing and on track for a fast GA.

And maintenance mode is a good thing! It means it’s not thrashing. Gas Town “just works.” It does its job, it has tons of integration points, and it has been stable for many weeks. People are using it to build real stuff.

As one example, Gene Kim and I were chatting with a very cool midsize company, who are making a company-wide move to adopt agentic AI. A person in their Communications department, who is a Comms major four years out of school, shared with us (to our lasting astonishment) that she has been using Gas Town since “a few weeks after it came out.” She decided to build replacement for a niche but pricey SaaS product their company has been paying for. She’s working with another non-technologist on it, and it’s so good the company is getting ready to switch over to it. Amazing!

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Anyone can build software with Gas Town — and people are!

Non-technologists using Gas town to build software! It sounds crazy but I’m seeing it all over. People in academia, non-technical knowledge workers, even just people curious about vibe coding; all are figuring it out.

So as far as I’m concerned, Gas Town is ready. That’s why I feel it merits a 1.0.0 release.

To get started, you just have your coding agent install it, and talk to the Mayor. More on that below. The Mayor is cool. You’ll like the Mayor.

Importantly, we are also rolling Beads to version 1.0.0 today. Beads is the secret sauce that makes Gas Town and Gas City both possible and best-of-class. I’ll spend some time talking about Beads before we get back to Gas Town.

Beads: The Memory Revolution

Last year I noticed that agents were struggling with basic stuff: working memory, and simple task tracking. They had zero attention span and developed progressive dementia. That led me to create Beads, which is a drop-in, generic, unopinionated memory system and knowledge graph for coding agents. Beads gives your coding agent sudden clarity and long-horizon planning capability.

Beads started life back in October as a lightweight issue tracker with version control. But it quickly became clear that it was like Adderall for your agent. It is an instant cognitive upgrade for any coding agent, even replacing their built-in memory and task tracking systems with a system that’s more powerful, more portable, and every bit as transparent and easy to use. You don’t need to know Beads in order to use it; your agent handles it all.

Over time, it became clear that Beads was a sort of universal discovery, a gift that keeps giving. It’s way more than an issue tracker, and is evolving gradually into something more like a universal ledger for all knowledge work. One that agents happen to really, really like.

It was a high-level insight from Chris Sells, an old friend of mine and (with Julian Knutsen) the co-creator of Gas City, that helped crystallize for me why Beads seems to solve so many problems at once: Beads is the Why.

Beads is the Missing Why

In Beads, every work item becomes a bead. A bead is just a structure with some fields: a lightweight bug/issue report, with a title, description, status, etc. Beads are stored and versioned in Git, linked together as a multi-graph, and they are queryable with SQL like a database. Best of all worlds.

Versioning your Beads is critical: you get a complete historical log of every change to any Bead, trivial to query. So in multi-agent environments, everyone using Beads can tell what everyone else using Beads did, and why.

Your project’s Git commit history has always been your permanent ledger that contains the What, Where, Who, and How of what happened to your code. But as Chris Sells astutely observed a few months back, Beads is the Why — the missing piece in your commit history. It completes the data-warehousing picture of your project needed (by agents) for forensics, recovery, onboarding, design, and more. Having this information handy is invaluable for agents when they are trying to reconstruct how we got where we are.

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Beads: The Missing Why for your projects

Individual beads capture and record all your work on the Git ledger, through its entire lifecycle, from planning/design, through implementation, and then they form the audit trail after the work is closed. This isn’t limited to development work, either; you can use it anything. Someone once told me they use Beads for their grocery shopping (which they do with an agent.)

A key insight was that you can use Beads for defining and tracking orchestration work, which is how Gas Town and Gas City operate. Beads string together into “molecules” that have deterministic steps to follow, for patrols, releases, etc. Every step an agent takes in a Beads-based workflow is recorded on a ledger. This acts like a save-game that you can roll back to, or at least use to see how you got where you are.

Beads is for Literally Everyone, and Everything

Beads is completely unaware of Gas Town (though Gas Town uses Beads as a dependency.) You can use Beads by itself and get a vastly improved agentic experience, no matter which coding agent you’re using. Unlike Gas Town, which only works with a handful of agents today, Beads works with anything and everything, as long as it’s roughly as smart as Claude Sonnet 3.5 was.

People who switch to Beads soon realize they can build their own workflows and orchestration using nothing but Beads. It’s an incredibly powerful and versatile data plane. Once you start storing stuff in Beads, you kind of want everything there. It doesn’t solve the memory problem by itself, but it certainly gives you a solid foundation for solving it your own way.

Beads crossed 20k stars on GitHub this week, a bit over 5 months since launch. I have not been much of a GitHub user for most of my career, so I didn’t appreciate how unusual 20k stars is until this week. Chris, Julian and I all guessed that roughly 10k-20k repos would be that popular. But we were way off. You can browse them all with a query. There are currently 1988 with more than 20k stars.

So Beads is already in roughly the top 2000 GitHub repos, out of some 300 million. That’s pretty rarified air. But it makes sense. I mean, it just works. It’s soooo easy. You start using Beads, everything becomes a bead, and life with agents just starts getting easier.

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Beads enters the stratosphere with 20k stars

Beads: Ready for v1

I held out on a v1.0.0 release for Beads for months because I had a feeling it would become clear when it’s ready for prime time. With the recent completion of Beads with Embedded Dolt by the amazing Dolt team, Beads is finally back to its Day Zero experience. We have managed to land on an architecture and implementation that serve all the key audiences:

Solo, single-player users with just a coding agent or a chat session. Great experience out of the box, simple setup, syncs to GitHub automatically.
Multi-agent power users who might be working on multiple projects or workflows.
Gas Town users doing high-velocity orchestration on heavy-duty project work.
Gas City users doing multiple projects and enterprise-level orchestration setups.
Wasteland and other federation users, who want the power of Dolt, Git, and Beads as a work federation protocol.
Anyone building their own orchestrator.

Many of these audiences were poorly served by the original, janky Beads architecture of SQLite + JSONL + awkward syncing and tons of merge conflicts. When it did work, it was often last-write wins semantics with SQLite just taking “whatever” happened to win. Not exactly enterprise-grade building material.

All that jank is gone. Torn out of the code base entirely. Beads is now backed with the power of Dolt, which itself sports an impressive 22k GH stars. The inherent fragility of the v0.x Beads architecture, with its bidirectional sync, 3-way merge, two sources of truth, race conditions, and tombstone hell — that’s all gone now. Dolt was designed to handle all this stuff gracefully. We got incredibly lucky that it exists at all.

Now that Beads is stable on Dolt, with both embedded and server-mode fully supported, v1.0.0 is the right call. I’ve moved the Beads repo into the gastownhall org (soon to be gascityhall), where we will continue to support Beads as a first-class standalone product for non-GT/GC users.

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Dolt: Migration complete!

Gas Town: It’s That Dang Mayor

I want to chat a little more about what we’ve learned about Gas Town before we wrap.

One of the reasons that people like Gas Town is that they don’t have to read as much, or even pay attention as closely. It’s more like DM’ing with a friend.

Claude Code makes you read. A lot. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like reading, or if this isn’t your native tongue, or if you’re busy, or tired. With coding agents, you’re gonna do some reading. Read read read read. It’s like a stevey post gone wild, running rampage, in every session. But make sure you don’t miss anything important!

I read just fine, and even I didn’t like doing all that reading. Most of it clearly could have been read by a model, saving me the trouble. I wanted something else, some other interface, but wasn’t sure what. I just didn’t want to have to read so much unnecessary cruft.

I spent a bunch of time building orchestrators last year, trying to get Claude to run Claude. At first, I was trying to achieve the elusive “visibility without reading” by chasing classic Observability. I was initially thinking that I wanted dashboards or activity feeds or some other visualization of my town’s workers. And some people still do like those, and they can be handy.

But after a while I realized I just wanted someone to talk to, while the system was working. And perhaps, as occasion might demand, someone to yell at.

The Mayor abstraction turned out to be perfect. Mayors are there to get yelled at. A Mayor isn’t so distant, like some higher-level governor or executive, to whom yelling seems like it will go unheard. A city mayor is ostensibly someone who has your local interests at heart, so the mayor is who you yell at first. It’s a social custom going back centuries. As one famous and rather wise U.S. mayor put it a week ago, if your constituents aren’t yelling at you, it’s because they aren’t around at all, and you don’t want that.

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Programming in 2026 will become talking to a face

With the Gas Town Mayor, you feel like you’re operating at a special level, a VIP, above all the workers. You are talking to someone important: the mayor of a factory the size of a town. You have access to someone with resources, someone who gets you, someone who appreciates how busy you are.

Working with regular coding agents just doesn’t give you that special feeling. I’m not making this up; this is a pretty consistent report I get from the field, from people around the world, particularly nontechnical people. I truly think it comes down to the Mayor giving you less stuff to read.

Claude Code only has one way to tell you what’s going on, which is to tell you what’s going on. It babbles while it works. “Now I will run this awk script s@(*fj$&h(*!&. Now I will print 8 pages of recaps. Now I’m deleting your database. Now I’m printing more recaps, and running another script here is the code #$AWESR@#$.”

Claude Code is a wall of scrolling text. The harder it works, the scrollier it gets. Now imagine having 10 standard coding agents running. Any agent, could be Codex, whatever. Ten of them puking out text. And you have to sort through all their output to find the nuggets of actually interesting stuff you need to know about, like the part where they’re deleting the database.

This is why people love Gas Town. The Mayor reads all that crap that the workers are printing. The Mayor knows your context, your hopes and dreams. The Mayor has an army of polecats it can whip up when it needs to. The Mayor has all these cool-sounding resources, like the Crew and Convoys and Dog patrols, that it can bring to bear on your problem. Just say the word, the Mayor’s on it for you.

Claude Code and some other agents are trying to turn themselves into dark factories, by running subagents, and providing their own task management, memory systems, etc. But so far, they’re all trying to do it with a product lens, no platform to speak of — a monolith. I’ve read some interesting blog posts about that approach, but safe to say I’m not a fan.

Gas Town at least lets you talk to your agents as first class citizens, with externally visible identities; Gas City takes it further and decomposes the entire stack into a modular platform architecture.

In short, what’s behind the Mayor also matters, and as soon as people start getting curious, today’s coding agents immediately disappoint. And believe you me, people are getting curious. And they’re finding their way to Gas Town.

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The Mayor does your reading for you, so you can supervise

Ultimately the Mayor is doing way more than just saving you a bunch of reading. It is your personal concierge. If Claude Code is an Executive Assistant, then the Gas Town Mayor is more like your Chief of Staff, who manages a full team of capable EAs, all working for you behind the scenes.

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.

On to Gas City

As I mentioned in my long-overdue Vibe Maintainer post, we’re going to start gently nudging everyone towards Gas City. You literally just install it, import your Gas Town configuration, and then you’re using that instead of Gas Town. It’s functionally identical, when used as a dev IDE.

Except with Gas City, you can now build your own orchestrators using all the Gas Town primitives: identity, roles, messaging, mail, sessions, cost tracking, multi-model dispatch, skills, prompting and priming, hooks, GUPP, NDI, formulas, molecules, beads, epics, convoys, orders, patrols, plugins, tmux, seances, and more more more. It’s all there. You can mix and match to create arbitrarily simple or fancy orchestrators, with all their work logged to a beautiful set of git ledgers.

There will be nothing like it. You are going to want to use Gas City. We will have some imitators, but I’m not worried. Ask your agent to dig into Dolt federation and have a look at our Wasteland, and you’ll quickly see why this is a superior way to do work.

I can’t begin to express my excitement about Gas City. It is all MIT-licensed, supported by a growing team of enthusiasts, and it is already starting to have legit hosting options for people who want to build orchestration in the cloud. I will have a detailed post about it when we get closer to GA, when it’s late beta and ready for wider adoption.

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,” “How can I rid myself of gougy niche SaaS by in-sourcing it all to AI,” and similar. I know you’re all thinking about it!

Stay tuned. I have another blog post hot on this one’s heels. I’m giving some talks next week, one in NYC and one in San Jose, and I figured, why not just spill all my talk secrets in a public blog so that I have nothing interesting or new to add during my talks!

Anyway, that’s a wrap! Congrats to the Beads community for riding the wave to the 1.0 release and 20k stars, and for finally getting a solid embedded-Dolt experience. Thanks to the Dolt team and Dustin Brown for that! And congrats to everyone who has used Gas Town to do something cool. I couldn’t be happier!

Finally, a huge thank you to the core team who have all worked incredibly hard to bring you Gas Town, Gas City, the Wasteland, and much more to come. From left to right, skipping me the panda, there’s Matt Beane, Chris Sells, Julian Knutsen, Tim Sehn, and Brendan Hopper. We’ve got so much more in store for this ecosystem. Come join our Discord at gastownhall.ai!

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Gas Town Ecosystem Generals: Matt, Chris, Steve, Julian, Tim, Brendan

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