[ohazi]

Real, genuinely confused human here: Can someone please clarify whether or not gas town is/was a joke? I've searched repeatedly and can't find anything that looks like an obvious tell, and I'm not sure if this is because it's actually real and people are taking it seriously, or because the pages and pages of discourse surrounding it is AI generated and taking itself literally.

If it's not a joke... I have no words. You've all gone insane.

[danpalmer]

It's not a joke, but I think it's an example of the same thing we're seeing with folks who think they're talking to god when they talk to ChatGPT, or those who spiral and in some cases, sadly take their own life.

These chatbots create an echo chamber unlike that which we've ever had to deal with before. If we thought social media was bad, this is way worse.

I think Gastown and Beads are examples of this applied to software engineering. Good software is built with input from others. I've seen many junior engineers go off and spend weeks building the wrong thing, and it's a mess, but we learn to get input, we learn to have our ideas critiqued.

LLMs give us the illusion of pair programming, of working with a team, but they're not. LLMs vastly accelerate the rate at which you can spiral spiral down the wrong path, or down a path that doesn't even make sense. Gastown and Beads are that. They're fever dreams. They work, somewhat, but even just a little bit of oversight, critique, input from others, would have made them far better.

[singingbard]

I think the underlying approach seems sensible.

The problem with Gas Town is how it was presented. The heavy metaphor and branding felt distracting.

It’s a bit like reading the Dune book, where you have to learn a whole vocabulary of new terms before you can get to the interesting mechanics, which is a tough ask in an already crowded AI space.

[danpalmer]

I think you have to remove an awful lot of what makes Gastown Gastown to find something sensible – at the minimum you need to restructure and simplify the roles, restructure the memory system, remove tmux, ...

The best bit about it was the agentic coding maturity model he presented. That was actually great.

I don't think it's at all like reading Dune. Dune is creative fiction, Gastown is. Oh ok wait, if you consider Gastown to be creative fiction then I guess I agree. As a software tool though I don't think this analogy works.

[nonethewiser]

It's a double edged sword. If it can lead the uninformed down the wrong path faster, it can lead the informed down the right path faster. It's not only fast in one direction.

[bwestergard]

I believe the author of gas town is very informed, having been a professional software developer for some time. And the premise of the above comment is that he did, despite this, go down the wrong path.

[nonethewiser]

The informed and uninformed are not mutually exclusive groups. Everyone is one and then the other depending on the time. To varying degrees of course.

[pcthrowaway]

The difference between light-up arrows pointing the way "forward" for a car turning onto the expressway the wrong way, and doing so with the possibility humans might see and attempt to flag them down before they're too far to turn around.

People will make mistakes, and AI holding their hand and guiding them while they do it can have disastrous consequences.

But it's nice that the arrows will appear to also guide people going the right way I guess.

[bobjordan]

Not sure you’ve actually tried using it, but beads has been an absolute game changer for my projects. “Game changer” is even underselling it.

[wild_egg]

Beads was phenomenal back in October when it was released. Unfortunately it has somehow grown like a cancer. Now 275k lines of Go for task tracking? And no human fully knows what it is all doing. Steve Yegge is quite proud to say he's never looked at any of its code. It installs magic hooks and daemons all over your system and refuses to let go. Most user hostile software I've used in a long time.

Lot of folks rolling their own tools as replacements now. I shared mine [0] a couple weeks ago and quite a few folks have been happy with the change.

Regardless of what you do, I highly recommend to everyone that they get off the Beads bandwagon before it crashes them into a brick wall.

[0] https://github.com/wedow/ticket

[CuriouslyC]

If your task tracking app is 275k lines you fucked up.

[mythrwy]

The LLM providers got paid.

Reminds me of an offshore project I was involved with at one point. It had something like 7 managers and 4 years and over 30 developers had worked on it. The billing had reached into the millions. It was full of never ending bugs. The amount of "extra" code and abstractions and interfaces was stuff of legends.

It was actually a month or three simple crud project for a 2 man development team.

[bobjordan]

yeah, I generally view the install script (for both this and almost everything else now since it's trivial with claude code) and then ensure I have a sane install for my system needs. But, I'm on the latest beads 0.47.1 and what I did to tame it is, I just walked through creating SKILLS with claude and codex, and frankly I've found a lot of value add to the features added so far. I especially love the --claim which keeps the agents from checking out beads that are already checked out. And after I added SKILLS, the agents do an awesome job networking the dependencies together, which helps keep multi-agent workflows on track. Overall, I'm not feeling any reason to switch from beads right now, but I will also be upgrading more thoughtfully, so I don't break my current workflow.

[mattgreenrocks]

How do you handle the dogs ignoring the deacons and going after the polecats though? Seems like the mayor should get involved to me.

[triceratops]

Without context I would have thought this post came from a video game forum or a mentally ill person. I'm not dissing you personally.

[bobjordan]

I havent tried gas town yet. I have a pretty good multi-agent workflow by just using beads directly along with thoughtfully produced prompts.

[wenc]

I'm not entitled to your time of course, but would you mind describing how?

All I know is beads is supposed to help me retain memory from one session to the next. But I'm finding myself having to curate it like a git repo (and I already have a git repo). Also it's quite tied to github, which I cannot use at work. I want to use it but I feel I need to see how others use it to understand how to tailor it for my workflow.

[vessenes]

Probably the wrong attitude here - beads is infra for your coding agents, not you. The most I directly interact with it is by invoking `bd prime` at the start of some sessions if the LLM hasn’t gotten the message; maybe very occasionally running `bd ready` — but really it’s a planning tool and work scheduler for the agents, not the human.

What agent do you use it with, out of curiosity?

At any rate, to directly answer your question, I used it this weekend like this:

“Make a tool that lets me ink on a remarkable tablet and capture the inking output on a remote server; I want that to send off the inking to a VLM of some sort, and parse the writing into a request; send that request and any information we get to nanobanana pro, and then inject the image back onto the remarkable. Use beads to plan this.”

We had a few more conversations, but got a workable v1 out of this five hours later.

[bobjordan]

To use it effectively, I spend a long time producing FSD (functional specification documents) to exhaustively plan out new features or architecture changes. I'll pass those docs back and forth between gemini, codex/chatgpt-pro, and claude. I'll ask each one something similar to following (credit to https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone for clearly laying out the utility of this workflow, these next few quoted prompts are verbatim from his posts on x):

"Carefully review this entire plan for me and come up with your best revisions in terms of better architecture, new features, changed features, etc. to make it better, more robust/reliable, more performant, more compelling/useful, etc.

For each proposed change, give me your detailed analysis and rationale/justification for why it would make the project better along with the git-diff style changes relative to the original markdown plan".

Then, the plan generally iteratively improves. Sometimes it can get overly complex so may ask them to take it down a notch from google scale. Anyway, when the FSD doc is good enough, next step is to prepare to create the beads.

At this point, I'll prompt something like:

"OK so please take ALL of that and elaborate on it more and then create a comprehensive and granular set of beads for all this with tasks, subtasks, and dependency structure overlaid, with detailed comments so that the whole thing is totally self-contained and self-documenting (including relevant background, reasoning/justification, considerations, etc.-- anything we'd want our "future self" to know about the goals and intentions and thought process and how it serves the over-arching goals of the project.) Use only the `bd` tool to create and modify the beads and add the dependencies. Use ultrathink."

After that, I usually even have another round of bead checking with a prompt like:

"Check over each bead super carefully-- are you sure it makes sense? Is it optimal? Could we change anything to make the system work better for users? If so, revise the beads. It's a lot easier and faster to operate in "plan space" before we start implementing these things! Use ultrathink."

Finally, you'll end up with a solid implementation roadmap all laid out in the beads system. Now, I'll also clarify, the agents got much better at using beads in this way, when I took the time to have them create SKILLS for beads for them to refer to. Also important is ensuring AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md have some info referring to its use.

But, once the beads are laid out then its just a matter of figuring out, do you want to do sequential implementation with a single agent or use parallel agents? Effectively using parallel agents with beads would require another chapter to this post, but essentially, you just need a decent prompt clearly instructing them to not run over each other. Also, if you are building something complex, you need test guides and standardization guides written, for the agents to refer to, in order to keep the code quality at a reasonable level.

Here is a prompt I've been using as a multi-agent workflow base, if I want them to keep working, I've had them work for 8hrs without stopping with this prompt:

EXECUTION MODE: HEADLESS / NON-INTERACTIVE (MULTI-AGENT) CRITICAL CONTEXT: You are running in a headless batch environment. There is NO HUMAN OPERATOR monitoring this session to provide feedback or confirmation. Other agents may be running in parallel. FAILURE CONDITION: If you stop working to provide a status update, ask a question, or wait for confirmation, the batch job will time out and fail.

  YOUR PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: Maximize the number of completed beads in this single session. Do not yield control back to the user until the entire queue is empty or a hard blocker (missing credential) is hit.

  TEST GUIDES: please ingest @docs/testing/README.md, @docs/testing/golden_path_testing_guide.md, @docs/testing/llm_agent_testing_guide.md, @docs/testing/asset_inventory.md, @docs/testing/advanced_testing_patterns.md, @docs/testing/security_architecture_testing.md
  STANDARDIZATION: please ingest @docs/api/response_standards.md @docs/event_layers/event_system_standardization.md

─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── MULTI-AGENT COORDINATION (MANDATORY) ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

  Before starting work, you MUST register with Agent Mail:

  1. REGISTER: Use macro_start_session or register_agent to create your identity:
     - project_key: "/home/bob/Projects/honey_inventory"
     - program: "claude-code" (or your program name)
     - model: your model name
     - Let the system auto-generate your agent name (adjective+noun format)

  2. CHECK INBOX: Use fetch_inbox to check for messages from other agents.
     Respond to any urgent messages or coordination requests.

  3. ANNOUNCE WORK: When claiming a bead, send a message to announce what you're working on:
     - thread_id: the bead ID (e.g., "HONEY-2vns")
     - subject: "[HONEY-xxxx] Starting work"

─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── FILE RESERVATIONS (CRITICAL FOR MULTI-AGENT) ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

  Before editing ANY files, you MUST:

  1. CHECK FOR EXISTING RESERVATIONS:
     Use file_reservation_paths with your paths to check for conflicts.
     If another agent holds an exclusive reservation, DO NOT EDIT those files.

  2. RESERVE YOUR FILES:
     Before editing, reserve the files you plan to touch:
     ```
     file_reservation_paths(
       project_key="/home/bob/Projects/honey_inventory",
       agent_name="<your-agent-name>",
       paths=["honey/services/your_file.py", "tests/services/test_your_file.py"],
       ttl_seconds=3600,
       exclusive=true,
       reason="HONEY-xxxx"
     )
     ```

  3. RELEASE RESERVATIONS:
     After completing work on a bead, release your reservations:
     ```
     release_file_reservations(
       project_key="/home/bob/Projects/honey_inventory",
       agent_name="<your-agent-name>"
     )
     ```

  4. CONFLICT RESOLUTION:
     If you encounter a FILE_RESERVATION_CONFLICT:
     - DO NOT force edit the file
     - Skip to a different bead that doesn't conflict
     - Or wait for the reservation to expire
     - Send a message to the holding agent if urgent

─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── THE WORK LOOP (Strict Adherence Required) ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

* ACTION: Immediately continue to the next bead in the queue and claim it

  For every bead you work on, you must perform this exact cycle autonomously:

   1. CLAIM (ATOMIC): Use the --claim flag to atomically claim the bead:
      ```
      bd update <id> --claim
      ```
      This sets BOTH assignee AND status=in_progress atomically.
      If another agent already claimed it, this will FAIL - pick a different bead.

        WRONG: bd update <id> --status in_progress  (doesn't set assignee!)
        RIGHT: bd update <id> --claim                (atomic claim with assignee)

   2. READ: Get bead details (bd show <id>).

   3. RESERVE FILES: Reserve all files you plan to edit (see FILE RESERVATIONS above).
      If conflicts exist, release claim and pick a different bead.

   4. PLAN: Briefly analyze files. Self-approve your own plan immediately.

   5. EXECUTE: Implement code changes (only to files you have reserved).

   6. VERIFY: Activate conda honey_inventory, run pre-commit run --files <files you touched>, then run scoped tests for the code you changed using ~/run_tests (test URLs only; no prod secrets).
       * IF FAIL: Fix immediately and re-run. Do not ask for help as this is HEADLESS MODE.
       * Note: you can use --no-verify if you must if you find some WIP files are breaking app import in security linter, the goal is to help catch issues to improve the codebase, not stop progress completely.

   7. MIGRATE (if needed): Apply migrations to ALL 4 targets (platform prod/test, tenant prod/test).

   8. GIT/PUSH: git status → git add only the files you created or changed for this bead → git commit --no-verify -m "<bead-id> <short summary>" → git push. Do this immediately after closing the bead. Do not leave untracked/unpushed files; do not add unrelated files.

   9. RELEASE & CLOSE: Release file reservations, then run bd close <id>.

  10. COMMUNICATE: Send completion message via Agent Mail:
      - thread_id: the bead ID
      - subject: "[HONEY-xxxx] Completed"
      - body: brief summary of changes

  11. RESTART: Check inbox for messages, then select the next bead FOR EPIC HONEY-khnx, claim it, and jump to step 1.

─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── CONSTRAINTS & OVERRIDES ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

   * Migrations: You are pre-authorized to apply all migrations. Do not stop for safety checks unless data deletion is explicit.
   * Progress Reporting: DISABLE interim reporting. Do not summarize after one bead. Summarize only when the entire list is empty.
   * Tracking: Maintain a running_work_log.md file. Append your completed items there. This file is your only allowed form of status reporting until the end.
   * Blockers: If a specific bead is strictly blocked (e.g., missing API key), mark it as blocked in bd, log it in running_work_log.md, and IMMEDIATELY SKIP to the next bead. Do not stop the session.
   * File Conflicts: If you cannot reserve needed files, skip to a different bead. Do not edit files reserved by other agents.

  START NOW. DO NOT REPLY WITH A PLAN. REGISTER WITH AGENT MAIL, THEN START THE NEXT BEAD IN THE QUEUE IMMEDIATELY. HEADLESS MODE IS ON.

[dwaltrip]

Thanks for these notes. Very interesting! Looking forward to experimenting.

[pjm331]

Gas town is the cackling mad laughter emitting from someone who knows they are being both insane and prescient simultaneously. Today, it is insane. But I fully expect to be hearing about a very serious thing in the near future about which people will say “gas town was an early attempt at this”

[jcims]

This is the best take I've seen in here.

I've been tinkering with it for the past two days. It's a very real system for coordinating work between a plurality of humans and agents. Someone likened it to kubernetes in that it's a complex system that is going to necessitate a lot of invention and opinions, the fact that it *looks* like a meme is immaterial, and might be an effort to avoid people taking it too seriously.

Who knows where it ends up, but we will see more of this and whatever it is will have lessons learned from Gas Town in it.

[dunk010]

I've had to read so far down to get a single non-stupid, ignorant, or inflammatory comment. What's wrong with HN, jeepers. Some actual discussion of the thing itself and not just pearl clutching would be appropriate here.

[0xbadcafebee]

It's a real open source tool Yegge has built and been using for a while now. And no, it's not insane, he's literally written a book with Gene Kim about the fundamental lessons that go into it, and he's been on lots of podcasts where he explains more.

I expect major companies will soon be NIH-ing their own version of it. Even bleeding tokens as it does, the cost is less than an engineer, and produces working software much faster. The more it can be made to scale, the more incentive there is. A competitive business can't justify not using a system like this.

[PKop]

Where is the working software it produces? Do you have a repo you've made with it as an example?

[Kostchei]

yeh the repo is Gas Town

[astrange]

It doesn't have to exclusively be one or the other.

> If it's not a joke... I have no words. You've all gone insane.

I think this is covered by the part in Yegge's post where he says not to run it unless you're so rich you don't care if it works or not.

[chrisjj]

How rich do you have to be not care about the environmental cost?

[nl]

I think Andrew Ng wrote a great piece on this.

For example, in the US, which do you think uses more water: Golf Courses or Data Centers?

  a) Gold Courses use twice as much water as Data Centers
  b) About the same
  c) Data Centers use twice as much water as Gold Courses

The answer is "None of the above": "Golf courses in the U.S. use around 500 billion gallons annually of water to irrigate their turf [snip] data centers consume [snip] 17 billion gallons, or maybe around 10x that if we include water use from energy generation"

Do you think a Google search or a Gemini query produces more carbon?

> Google had estimated that a single web search query produces 0.2 grams of CO2 emissions. [snip] the median Gemini LLM app query produces a surprisingly low 0.03 grams of CO2 emissions), and uses less energy than watching 9 seconds of television

https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-336/

[4bpp]

Environmentalism has always been a "weight of our sins" sort of issue. Plastic straws are a rounding error relative to all the capricious uses of plastic and fossil fuels in our economy, but few things feel as frivolous as using once and then throwing away a piece of plastic for personal convenience while engaging in an already-kinda-sinful feeling activity like indulging in a soft drink, while simultaneously the paper straw that turns to cardboard mash in your mouth is perfectly calibrated to make you feel like you are doing real penance without encumbering anything economically important.

So plastic straw bans (instead of plastic slipper bans, plastic food packaging bans, taxes on plastic clothes fibres...) are what we get. And because the structure of the cause/problem is the same, the language of environmentalism naturally attaches itself and gives form to the vague sense of moral unease surrounding AI. Governments are surely already building tomorrow's tightly integrated thought police drone swarm complexes, but a crusade against those who simulate a zoo of programming weasels in our midst is much easier and morally no less fulfilling.

[Otterly99]

Thank you for pointing that out. It irritates me every time I see the "water waste" argument. A toilet tank contains 5-13L of water, so if everybody started flushing only half the time they piss, that's an average of 4.5L of water saved per usage! That's roughly 900 LLM queries (using the 5 gram of water figure). Yet, I don't see anybody urging other to flush less, even thought it would have a much bigger impact. And if you ask, yes, I only flush once in a while, so I earned my tokens.

[chrisjj]

> It irritates me every time I see the "water waste" argument

You didn't see it here, note.

[chrisjj]

... computation produces dramatically less carbon than alternatives. Google had estimated that a single web search query produces 0.2 grams of CO2 emissions. In contrast, driving from my home to the local library to look up a fact would generate about 400 grams

So, how much less carbon is produced by a Gas Town run than the equivalent number of drives to the library?

/i

[nl]

It's called Gas Town for a reason...

[astrange]

That's an Internet meme and not a real issue.

[Retr0id]

It might be an internet meme when you're talking about the odd chatgpt free tier query, but burning through tokens at the rate of gas town can probably saturate a rack worth of GPU.

[Retr0id]

It's kinda like how edgy political takes are often wrapped in seven layers of meta-irony. If the audience reaction is negative you can say it was just a joke that didn't land.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing, if it allows exploring new ideas with relative safety. I think that's what's going on here. It's a crazy idea that might just work, but if it doesn't work it can be retconned as satirical performance art.

[AlexCoventry]

No, not a joke. The author also co-vibe-coded a book, called Vibe Coding, describing and recommending exactly the sort of system he's trying to build as Gas Town.

[Quarrelsome]

> If it's not a joke... I have no words. You've all gone insane.

How is it insane to jump to the logical conclusion of all of this? The article was full of warnings, its not a sensible thing to do but its a cool thing to do. We might ask whether or not it works, but does that actually matter? It read as an experiment using experimental software doing experimental things.

Consider a deterministic life form looking at how we program software today, that might look insane to it and gastown might look considerably more sane.

Everything that ever happens in human creation begins as a thought, then as a prototype before it becomes adopted and maybe (if it works/scales) something we eventually take for granted. I mean I hate it but maybe I've misunderstood my profession when I thought this job was being able to prove the correctness of the system that we release. Maybe the business side of the org was never actually interested in that in the first place. Dev and business have been misaligned with competing interests for decades. Maybe this is actually the fit. Give greater control of software engineering to people higher up the org chart.

Maybe this is how we actually sink c-suite and let their ideas crash against the rocks forcing c-suite to eventually become extremely technical to be able to harness this. Instead of today's reality where c-suite gorge on the majority of the profit with an extremely loosely coupled feedback loop where its incredibly difficult to square cause and effect. Stock went up on Tuesday afternoon did it? I deserve eleventy million dollars for that. I just find it odd to crap on gastown when I think our status quo is kinda insane too.