Comment by vessenes
17 days ago
I put in 15 hours or so with gas town this weekend, from just around the 0.1 release.
Think of as an extended bipolar-optimism-fueled glimpse into the future. Steve's MO is laid out in the medium post - but basically, it's okay to lose things, rewrite whole subsystems, whatever, this is the future. It's really fun and interesting to watch the speed of development.
I've made a few multi agent coding setups in the last year, and I think gas town has the team side about right: big boss (mayor), operations boss (deacon), relatively linear keeper of truth (witness), single point for merges (refiner), lots of coders with their code held lightly.
I love the idea of formulas - a lot of what makes gas town work and informs how well it ultimately will work is the formulas. They're close conceptually to skills.
I don't love the mad max branding, but meh, whatever, it's fun, and a perk of the brave new world where you can make stuff like for a few hundred bucks a month sent to anthropic - software can have personality again, yay.
Conceptually I think there is a product team element to this still missing - deploy engineers, product managers, visual testing. Everything is sort of out there, janky in parts, but workable to glue together right now, and will only improve. That said, the mad max town analogy is going to get overstretched at some point; we already have pretty good names for all the parts that are needed, and as coordination improves, we're going to want to add more stuff into the coordination. So, I'd like to see a version of this with normal names and expanded.
Upshot - worth a look - if beads is any indication, give it a month or two or four to settle down unless you like living on the bleeding bleeding edge.
As someone who never saw Mad Max, Slow Horses, Cat’s Cradle, Breaking Bad and only saw Waterworld when I was a kid all the references in this post went completely over my head, and I just think of words used in there as their own terminology. Like, if non-engineers read about chemical production.
The article was pretty Ok. Kubernetes has it's own share of obnoxious terminology that often comes up as "we name it different so that it doesn't sound like AWS". At some point you just accept the terminology in relation to the tool you use and move on.
Did you get anything workable out of it? How much money did you end up burning? (If you don't mind me asking)
Yes, definitely. I spent about half that time poking around, understanding the setup, doing some bug fixing and put in a PR for gas town itself, although I used Claude Code separately for making the PR.
I pointed it at a Postgres time series project I was working on, and it deployed a much better UI and (with some nudging) fixed docker errors on a remote server, which involved logging in to the server to check logs. It probably opened and fixed 50 or so beads in total.
I'd reach for it first to do something complicated ("convoy" or epic) over Claude Code even as is -- like, e.g. "copy this data ingestion we do for site x, and implement it for sites y,z,,a,b,c,d. start with a formal architecture that respects our current one and remains extensible for all these sites" is something I think it would do a fair job at.
As to cost - I did not run out of my claude pro max subscription poking around with it. It infers ... a lot ... though. I pulled together a PR that would let you point some or all of the agent types at local or other endpoints, but it's a little early, I think for the codebase. I'd definitely reach for some cheaper and/or faster inference for some of the use cases.
How do you do the multi agent setups in containers? I keep trying to figure out ways to start with stuff like this but it always boils down to I don't want to give entirely autonomous agents access to my entire filesystem and/or github perms. I just want them to be able to hack away in their own container and produce a pr I can read or test. I think something like a local git with the remote in the container pointing at the version on the machine could be a start but setting all that up is not trivial. As far as I can tell Steve is just running everything on the base machine in multiple worktreees/multiple clones of the project - which seems to put enormous amounts of trust on agents to actually create branches in a disciplined way. I can't imagine they can be trusted to?