Comment by stephen_cagle

let me take a shot. i have thought about both for a while.

dspy is declarative. you say what you want.

dspy says “if you can say what you want in my format, I will let you extract as much value from current LLMs as possible” with its inference strategies (RLM, COT; “modules”) and optimizers (GEPA).

gas town is … given a plan, i will wrangle agents to complete the plan. you may specify workflows (protomolecules/molecules) that will be repeatedly executed.

the control flow is good about capturing delegation. the mayor writes plans, and polecats do the work. you could represent gas town as a dspy program in a while loop, where each polecat loops until its hooked work is done. when work is finished, its sent to the merge queue and integrated.

gas town uses mostly ephemeral agents as the units for doing work .

you could in theory write gas town with dspy . the execution layer is just an abstraction . gas town operates on beads as state . you could funnel these beads thru a dspy program as well.

the parallels imo are mostly just structured orchestration .

i hope this comes off as sane. 2026 will be a fun year.