A few weeks ago Steve Yegge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge published an elaborate manifesto and guide https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04 to Gas Town, his Mad-Max-Slow-Horses-Waterworld-etc-themed agent orchestrator that runs dozens of coding agents simultaneously in a metaphorical town of automated activity. Gas Town is entirely vibecoded, hastily designed with off-the-cuff solutions, and inefficiently burning through thousands of dollars a month in API costs.
This doesn’t sound promising, but it’s lit divisive debates and sparks of change across the software engineering community. A small hype machine has formed around it. It’s made the rounds through every engineering team’s Slack, probably twice. There’s somehow already a $GAS https://bags.fm/7pskt3A1Zsjhngazam7vHWjWHnfgiRump916Xj7ABAGS meme coin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme_coin doing over $400k in earnings. And the hype is justified. First, because it’s utterly unhinged, and second because it’s a serious indication of how agents will change the nature of software development from this point on.
Welcome to Gas Town Steve Yegge
You should at least skim through Yegge’s original article before continuing to read my reflections. First, because I’m not going to comprehensively summarise it. And second, because a even a one minute glance over Yegge’s style of writing will make the vibes clear.
We should take Yegge’s creation seriously not because it’s a serious, working tool for today’s developers (it isn’t). But because it’s a good piece of speculative design fiction that asks provocative questions and reveals the shape of constraints we’ll face as agentic coding systems mature and grow.
What is Design Fiction? Read more “Design fiction” or “speculative design” is a branch of design where you creating things (objects, prototypes, sketches) from a plausible near future. Not to predict what’s going to happen, but to provoke questions and start conversations about what could happen. Not in a bright-and-glorious-flying-cars way that futurism can sometimes fall into. But, most helpfully, in a way that thinks about banal details, overlooked everyday interactions, low status objects, imperfect implementations, knock-on effects, and inconveniences. See the Near Future Lab’s short explainer video https://nearfuturelaboratory.com/what-is-design-fiction/ and their Manual of Design Fiction https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-manual-of-design-fiction/julian-bleecker/nick-foster/9789083499390 if you want to learn more.
I also think Yegge deserves praise for exercising agency and taking a swing at a system like this, despite the inefficiencies and chaos of this iteration. And then running a public tour of his shitty, quarter-built plane while it’s mid-flight.
When I was taken to the Tate Modern as a child I’d point at Mark Rothko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rothko pieces and say to my mother “I could do that”, and she would say “yes, but you didn’t.” Many people have talked about what large-scale, automated agent orchestration systems could look like in a few years, and no one else attempted to sincerely build it.
“Orange and Yellow” and “Royal Red and Blue” by Mark Rothko
Paintings I could totally make myself, but did not
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