On January 1st, Steve Yegge published “Welcome to Gas Town,” an introduction to his new AI agent orchestration tool written in a loose and chaotic mode, and accompanied by AI-generated images depicting a fictional industrial city populated with weasels (yes, really).
Reactions were swift, mostly agog at the scale and hubris of such a (self-admittedly) wasteful and obscenely expensive system, and alternately confused or amazed at the amount of new, insular language tailor-made to describe it.
In the interest of making Gas Town intelligible (because, despite the prose, the idea of agent orchestration it describes will be important), I’d like to share a quick decoder for the many new terms Steve introduces. His article itself offers definitions, but those definitions reuse his insular terms, making by-hand decoding tedious. Here, I’ve done the work for you.
Steve’s Term Real-World Definition Alternative Term Town Top-level folder containing your individual projects. The gt binary manages projects under this folder. Workspace Rig A project. It’s a folder tracked by a unique Git repository within your workspace. Project Overseer The user (you). You have an “inbox” to receive notifications from agents in your projects. User Mayor The managing agent for a project. Usually you send this agent messages, and it coordinates the work of other agents in the project. Manager Agent Polecat Worker agent, taking commands from the mayor, doing some work, submitting a Merge Request, and then stopping. Worker Agent Refinery Merge agent, who coordinates and makes decisions about merge requests coming from Worker Agents. Merge Agent Witness Fixer agent, that watches the worker agents and tries to fix any that are stuck. Fixer Agent Deacon Maintenance agent, runs a consistent workflow in a loop, unlike “worker agents” who do arbitrary tasks and then die. Maintenance Manager Agent Dogs Maintenance worker agents who do cleanup tasks, directed by the Maintenance Agent. Maintenance Worker Agents Boot the Dog Maintenance Manager checker agent, just checks on the Maintenance Manager Agent periodically to see if it needs a reboot or anything else. Maintenance Manager Checker Agent Crew Persistent Worker Agents, which you talk to directly (not through the Mayor), and which persist after their tasks are done, to be reused. These are per-Project. Persistent Worker Agents. Beads System for tracking work history across the system. Work Tracker Rig Beads Project-specific work, tracked in the Work Tracker. Project Work Town Beads Whole-workspace work, tracked in the Work Tracker. Workspace Work
Even with these definitions and alternative terms, Gas Town is still a bit of a mess, with watchers-on-watchers at times (do we really need a Maintenance Manager Checker Agent?). That said, hopefully this decoder at least makes understanding what Gas Town is easier.