[nickorlow]

yeah, seems like a much simpler design though (i.e. only seems like one 'special/leader' agent, and the rest are all workers vs gastown having something like 8 different roles mayor, polecat, witnesses, etc).

Wonder how they compare?

[greenfish6]

i would have to imagine the gastown design isn't optimal though? why 8, and why does there need to multiple hops of agent communications before two arbitrary agents communicate with each other as opposed to single shared filespace?

[Ethee]

I've been using Gas Town a decent bit since it was released. I'd agree with you that it's design is sub-optimal, but I believe that's more due to the way the actual agents/harnesses have been designed as opposed to optimal software design. The problem you often run into is that agents will sometimes hang thinking they need human input for a problem they are on, or they think they're at a natural stopping point. If you're trying to do fully orchestrated agentic coding where you don't look at the code at all (putting aside whether that's good or not for a second) then this is sub-optimal behavior, and so these extra roles have been designed to 'keep the machine going' as it were.

Often times if I'm only working on a single project or focus, then I'm not using most of those roles at all and it's as you describe, one agent divvying out tasks to other agents and compiling reports about them. But due to the fact that my velocity with this type of coding is now based on how fast I can tell that agent what I want, I'm often working on 3 or 4 projects simultaneously, and Gas Town provides the perfect orchestration framework for doing this.

[cstejerean]

the problem with gastown is it tries to use agents for supervision when it should be possible to use much simpler and deterministic approaches to supervision, and also being a lot more token efficient

[slfnflctd]

I strongly believe we will need both agentic and deterministic approaches. Agentic to catch edge cases & the like, deterministic as those problems (along with the simpler ones early on) are continually turned into hard coded solutions to the maximum extent possible.

Ideally you could eventually remove the agentic supervisor. But for some cases you would want to keep it around, or at least a smaller model which suffices.

[nickorlow]

yegge's article does come off as complicated design for the sake of complication