Gas Town, illustrated
Steve Yegge's Gas Town is a Mad-Max-flavored toolkit for running a swarm of coding agents — a mayor, a witness, a deacon, and a lot of polecats, all pointed at the same repo. Somebody asked for a labeled picture instead of the blog post. Here's the picture, plus the rest of the lexicon underneath it.
the mayor's crate is slightly too small for the mayor. this is thematically appropriate.
the field guide
1Mayor — the chief-of-staff agent. Coordinates work across rigs and usually kicks off a convoy.
2Polecat — a worker agent. Persistent identity, ephemeral sessions; spins up on a rig to produce a merge request, then gets decommissioned.
3Refinery — the merge-queue processor. Serializes merges to main one at a time so nothing collides.
4Witness — the patrol agent that watches the polecats on a rig and helps them get unstuck.
5Deacon — a patrol agent running workflows in a loop, propagating signals to keep the whole town functioning.
6Dogs — town-level workers who are the Deacon's personal crew: maintenance and handyman tasks.
7Boot — a special Dog woken every five minutes just to check on the Deacon's wellbeing.
8Crew — per-rig coding agents with long-lived identities, managed by the Overseer for design work.
9Overseer — that's the human. Has an identity in the system too: inbox, town mail, the works.
10Town — your headquarters, orchestrating all the workers across all the rigs.
11Rig — a git repository placed under Gas Town management, with its own role-specific workers.
12Wanted board — the posted work queue out in the Wasteland, where any town can claim a job.
13Gate (Merge Queue's cousin) — a workflow state where execution pauses, waiting on something external to finish, like CI.
14Convoy — a special bead that wraps a batch of work into one trackable delivery.
15Beads — the atomic unit of work: durable, version-controlled JSON issues living in git, and the whole ecosystem's memory.
16Wisp — an ephemeral bead. Lives in the database, never makes it to git, gets burned after completion.
17Guzzoline — the sea of work molecules sitting around for agents to consume. The fuel.
18Wasteland — the federation linking towns together: a shared commons with portable reputation, built on stamps.
the rest of the lexicon (not pictured, still real)
Bead — singular of Beads: one atomic, durable, version-controlled unit of work.
Stamp — a multi-dimensional attestation on finished work: quality, reliability, creativity, not just pass/fail.
Formula — a TOML recipe describing a workflow, "cooked" into a protomolecule.
Molecule (Mol) — a chained workflow made of sequenced beads, any shape, any dependencies.
Protomolecule — a template of beads with instructions, waiting to be instantiated into a real workflow.
Hook — a pinned bead on each agent where its next molecule gets hung for execution.
Handoff — the core "graceful restart": a worker cleans up and a fresh session picks the hooked work back up.
Séance — a worker talking to its predecessor in the same role, via
gt seance / /resume.Swarm — ephemeral agent sessions all taking on persistent work at once.
Patrol — the looping ephemeral workflow that patrol workers like Witness, Deacon, and Refinery run.
GUPP — the Gastown Universal Propulsion Principle: an agent must always be running work off its hook.
GUPP Nudge — the workaround message that pokes an agent to go check its hook and mail.
MEOW — Molecular Expression of Work: the whole stack of Beads, Epics, Molecules, and Formulas together.
NDI — Nondeterministic Idempotence: the durability principle that lets workflows finish even when the AI in the loop doesn't behave the same way twice.
Merge Queue (MQ) — the Refinery's actual mechanism: sequential merges so parallel polecats don't collide.
Epics — beads with children: top-down planning with real dependencies.
Activity Feed — the auto-generated log of finished issues as workers move through their workflows.
Plugins — coordinated agent attention scheduled into a workflow for extra functionality.
Mol Mall — the planned marketplace for trading formula-based workflow templates.
Rule of Five — a formula that runs five review passes over a piece of work for good measure.
Sessions — the ephemeral Claude Code instances (the cattle) agents throw at persistent work.
gt — the Go binary that is Gas Town's town manager:
gt sling assigns work, gt nudge messages a worker, gt handoff restarts one.tmux — the actual user interface for all of this. Every rig, every session, one terminal multiplexer.