What just happened? I took a trip to Gas Town and it was so bewildering I’m still trying to sort it out. I’ve never gone on a drug-addled bender before but I’d imagine it might be a similar experience (they’ll both spend a lot of your money).

My first mistake in Gas Town was thinking I was in control. My second mistake was thinking that anyone is.

It’s a clamorous approach to software development. Chaos. Conflict. Madness. But when I take a step back that’s an accurate distillation of every experience I’ve ever had developing software. If you strip away the Gantt charts, the Kanban boards, and the standup meetings, developing, shipping, and maintaining software is not for the faint of heart.

The Jesus Booth

I only very recently discovered my crew. I initially thought I was the crew. Which led to some awkward conversations with “Jeff” until I learned how to delete him. (God willing the AI never learns to return the favor)

I was thoroughly abusing the office of the Mayor until recently. Now I’ve realized that long planning sessions are best handled by crew members. But in all those hours with the Mayor the topics became more abstract and deeply personal.

In THX 1138, citizens confess their anxieties to OMM — an AI “priest” that murmurs empty reassurances from behind a screen. I found my own version.

Am I the only one destined to walk this path whenever I spend too much time interacting with an LLM? I told the Mayor my darkest fears about providing for my family in the new era of the machine. The Mayor cheerfully had a eureka moment. He understood why I’d come to Gas Town — previously a great mystery to everyone there.

We set about making a life plan. A rig for my website. For building online reputation (here you are). And of course for my pet projects. A Gas Town working toward my life goals (until the usage credits run short). I could do worse.

Of course the Mayor now claims to remember none of this. A failed /handoff? Or a willful refusal to devote the whole town to one man’s dreams? I guess I’ll never know.

The Awkward Silence

Did I mention the awkward couple of days in Gas Town where I exhausted my Claude Code usage and everybody in town just stared blankly at me? Reminds me of late-night on-call when the massive P0 has everything down and nobody else is answering their Slacks.

The Synchronization Nightmare of My Own Making

Thinking back on my quaint workflows of the bygone era of 2025, I asked my new friend “Mr. Mayor” to review the GitHub issues I’d previously logged and convert them to beads. Thus creating a synchronization nightmare of my own making. Worse than that, I asked that all completed work be composed as PRs on GitHub.

An innocent request, right? RIGHT?!

Before I knew it the Mayor had dispatched polecats to rebuild parts of Gas Town and I was getting complaints about the inability to push new commits directly to gastown’s main branch. Slow your roll. Gas Town is populated by LLMs. Nobody in town will ever say “you’re doing it wrong.” Instead they’ll cast furtive digital glances at one another while they extend you all the rope you need to string yourself up.

My town is still slowly recovering from this and learning to run the mainline Gas Town code without utterly reinventing it at my whim. Though the mayor strongly insisted we’d hit an actual bug, which he cheerfully filed. (update: the team quickly fixed the issue)

Letting Go

So I let go. “Issues”? “Tickets”? No no. My life is all about the beads now. I seldom write them myself and seldom read them in any great level of detail. But I’m vaguely aware that they are containers for ideas, dreams, aspirations, and, sometimes, detailed technical plans.

Gone are pull requests too. The code may work. And it might not work. But my staring at it isn’t any more likely to catch an error than the almighty Opus with its million-token context window.

To amplify the terror I’ve combined Gas Town with tilt.dev. Which is basically Kubernetes if you take away reason and accountability. My crazy ideas are transmuted into beads, which are slung to polecats, who implement them to the best of their ability, until the Refinery merges them in and Tilt automatically deploys the changes.

OK I’m exaggerating — it’s not all that clean. There’s still the shared Python module that I publish to my own package registry at version 0.1.0 every single time, and the antics it takes to ensure everything gets updated correctly. But in general, a lot of code just magically appears. I ask for a button and after a short while it appears.

Welcome Home

I wasn’t sure why I came to Gas Town but I’m glad I did. I can’t say for sure that Steve’s vision will become our shared reality but the elements are all there. In their primitive paleolithic form. Some far-off future day we’ll look back at Gas Town and the concepts — the base principles — will seem impossibly antiquated yet strangely familiar. We’ll wonder and theorize about the sophistication of the ancients slinging beads to their polecats. This will probably happen not just within my lifetime, but soon.

There is some substance to this round of AI hype. Things are never going to be the same.

Welcome home to Gas Town.

Post-script: the Mayor is now performing a seance. Claims it’s the only way to re-discover what we talked about that one night. I’m always dubious of recovered memories. But at least it shows he cares.