Gas Town Emergency User Manual

Source: Steve Yegge Date: 2026-01-13 URL: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/gas-town-emergency-user-manual-cf0e4556d74b?source=rss-c1ec701babb7------2

Summary

An operational manual for Gas Town as an agent orchestration system, structured around three nested development loops (outer, middle, inner) and the Crew/Polecat distinction: named, long-lived agents for design-intensive work versus ephemeral agents for well-defined execution tasks. Yegge emphasizes code review sweeps to catch “heresies” — incorrect architectural assumptions agents embed in code — and frames the whole workflow as “tending an invisible garden”: you can’t watch agents work directly, you must inspect output regularly and guide the system toward maintaining project vision.

Implications

The orchestration-design thread, tactical. This is the most concrete operational document Yegge has published about multi-agent workflow. The Crew/Polecat distinction is a real architectural pattern — persistent context for hard problems, ephemeral context for execution — that maps onto how Claude Code’s own agent-spawning works (subagents vs. main session).

“Heresies” as a quality control concept. The framing of agents embedding incorrect assumptions is more precise than the generic “hallucination” concern. Heresies are architectural drift — agents making locally-reasonable decisions that violate global design constraints. This is a solvable tooling problem (persistent design documents, architectural linters) that nobody has shipped well yet.

tmux as the interface layer. Yegge naming tmux as the multi-agent management tool is notable — it’s a stopgap, not a solution. The existence of this manual as a user-written artifact signals that Gas Town (and agent orchestration broadly) is still in the “experts only, bring your own workflow” phase.

Watch: whether Gas Town ships a first-class multi-agent management UI that replaces the tmux layer; whether “heresy detection” becomes a named feature in any orchestration tool; adoption of the Crew/Polecat pattern outside Yegge’s own projects.