So You've Heard About Gas Town. Here's What It's Actually Like.#
Published on January 13, 2025
First: Go Read These#
Seriously. Stop here if you haven't read Steve Yegge's posts:
- Welcome to Gas Town — The intro
- The Future of Coding Agents — The why
Read them. Come back. I'll wait.
TL;DR: What Even Is Gas Town?#
Okay, so you've read the posts (or skimmed, I don't judge).
Here's Gas Town in plain English: Gas Town is a toolkit for running multiple AI coding agents at once, with a coordinator agent managing them. That's it. Not "Kubernetes for AI" — that's too abstract. Think of it this way: you know how you use Claude Code to help you build stuff? One AI, one chat, one task at a time? Gas Town lets you run a bunch of Claude Code instances simultaneously, each working on a different task, while another Claude instance (the "Mayor") coordinates the whole thing.
The name comes from Mad Max: Fury Road. You'll get it.
The Setup#
I'm not going to repeat the install steps here — the Gas Town README has everything you need.
The short version: you install Gas Town, install Beads (the task tracking system), create a workspace, add your project (called a "rig"), and run gt mayor attach.
That last command is where things get interesting.
My First Time: Talking to the Mayor#
So I ran gt mayor attach and... now what?
The Mayor is your entry point. It's an AI agent that coordinates other AI agents. You talk to it like you'd talk to Claude Code, but it has superpowers — it can spawn workers, track tasks, manage merges. But I had no idea what to say.
So I did something simple first. I used Claude Desktop's "Claude Cowork" feature to create a spec for a project idea I had. Just asked it to research the problem, compile findings, suggest features, write up differentiators — the usual product spec stuff.
Did some light editing. Some features were intentionally ambitious (cool to have, probably not realistic). But whatever. I kept it as-is.
Then when creating my first convoy, I told it to "look at the spec docs/spec.md" — probably should've asked the Mayor to break it down first, but hey... we all learn.
Watching It Work (And Feeling Weird)#
After the Mayor shattered the spec into "beads" (Gas Town's word for tasks), I just... kept talking to it.
"What's going on?" "Can I see what we're doing?" "What are the polecats working on?"
Polecats are the worker agents. They spawn, pick up a task, do the work in their own isolated git worktree, and disappear when they're done. Like contractor devs who show up, ship a feature, and ghost you.
The Mayor told me what was happening. I could also check the GT dashboard to visualize it.
Here's the thing. It feels a little freaky.
Even as someone generally comfortable with AI agents. Multiple processes. Code is getting written somewhere. And I can't directly control it.
But it's alright, because the Mayor's here. And when you feel freaked out, just talk to it. Ask questions. It knows what's going on (and hopefully it's supposed to).
The Aha Moment (Sort Of)#
It hasn't fully "clicked" for me yet. But here's when it started to feel real:
Watching commits come in.
Polecats finish tasks. Code gets committed. The merge train starts working. You see actual progress in your repo — code you didn't write, solving problems you defined.
All my M1 Max CPU cores were 100% busy. Grinding beads (haha, should've been beans!). Not sure if it was actually building software or just slopping around — but something was definitely happening.
And on a $100/month Claude plan, I got through 20+ tasks before hitting rate limits. That's... a lot more than I expected.
What Went Wrong#
Some things didn't work smoothly:
Refinery didn't spin up. The Refinery is the agent that keeps an eye on the merge queue — when a task is done, it gets it into the main branch. When I tried to spin it up myself, it got hung up. I asked the Mayor to fix it — and it did. I don't really understand what it did, but it worked.
That's the trust part. You have to loosen up a bit.
I probably could have designed my spec better. Going in with just a high-level design meant the Mayor had to figure out a lot. More structure upfront = fewer tokens wasted on coordination.
Empty repos don't work. I tried starting from literally nothing — Gas Town needs at least one file in the repo to work with.
For Everyone Saying "I'm Not Ready for Gas Town"#
A lot of people react like that after reading the post about Gas Town. And honestly? It's probably true of most of us right now.
But you can get ready.
Steve posted levels of agentic coding on his blog (1 through 8). If you're at 3, look at 4. If you're at 5, figure out 6.
The levels (roughly):
- Asking ChatGPT questions
- Copilot autocomplete
- Chatting with Claude/GPT for code help
- Claude Code / Cursor for full tasks
- Running 2-3 agents manually on a variety of tasks
- Running 5-10 agents, starting to feel like chaos
- Running 10+ agents, hand-managing coordination
- Building your own orchestrator — Gas Town fills in for this
Steve says you can start Gas Town at 6. Are you going to give it a shot?
Don't skip levels. Each gives you something.
How to practice:
- Use a throwaway project. Nothing to lose.
- Or: pull a repo where you solved something months ago. Look at the commit before you solved it. Ask agents to do what you did. See how it compares.
What I'd Do Differently#
More thought into the spec and breakdown upfront.
I went hands-off intentionally — wanted to see where Gas Town would take me without micromanaging. It worked! But a better-structured spec would've meant less wasted tokens.
Start with just the Mayor longer.
You don't need to spawn 10 polecats on day one. Get comfortable with the Mayor first. Let it help you create beads. Understand the rhythm before scaling up.
The Bottom Line#
Gas Town is strange. It's a new mental model. You aren't driving anymore — you're doing air traffic control.
But it works. 20+ tasks on a $100 plan. Real code. Real commits.
That scary feeling? That's normal. Keep talking to the Mayor. Keep your eyes glued to the dashboard. Trust the process (a bit).
And if you're not ready? That's okay. Level up in your own time. Gas Town will be here when you get there.
This was my first time in the Mad Max reality haha!
Links#
Written after actually trying it. Still learning. But it works.