Gas Town Decoded

Summary

Gas Town Decoded January 14, 2026· Read in 3 minutes · Topics: AI On January 1st, Steve Yegge published “Welcome to Gas Town,” an introduction to his new AI agent orchestration tool written in a loose and chaotic mode, and accompanied by AI-generated images depicting a fictional industrial city populated with weasels (yes, really).Reactions were swift, mostly agog at the scale and hubris of such a (self-admittedly) wasteful and obscenely expensive system, and alternately confused or amazed at the amount of new, insular language tailor-made to describe it.In the interest of making Gas Town intelligible (because, despite the prose, the idea of agent orchestration it describes will be important), I’d like to share a quick decoder for the many new terms Steve introduces. His article itself offers definitions, but those definitions reuse his insular terms, making by-hand decoding tedious. Here, I’ve done the work for you.Steve’s TermReal-World DefinitionAlternative TermTownTop-level folder containing your individual projects. The gt binary manages projects under this folder.WorkspaceRigA project. It’s a folder tracked by a unique Git repository within your workspace.ProjectOverseerThe user (you). You have an “inbox” to receive notifications from agents in your projects.UserMayorThe managing agent for a project. Usually you send this agent messages, and it coordinates the work of other agents in the project.Manager AgentPolecatWorker agent, taking commands from the mayor, doing some work, submitting a Merge Request, and then stopping.Worker AgentRefineryMerge agent, who coordinates and makes decisions about merge requests coming from Worker Agents.Merge AgentWitnessFixer agent, that watches the worker agents and tries to fix any that are stuck.Fixer AgentDeaconMaintenance agent, runs a consistent workflow in a loop, unlike “worker agents” who do arbitrary tasks and then die.Maintenance Manager AgentDogsMaintenance worker agents who do cleanup tasks, directed by the Mainte...