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.
Copyright Andrew Lilley Brinker. Made with in California