2026-02-03-gas-town-decoded

Gas Town Decoded — Andrew Lilley Brinker

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 Term	Real-World Definition	Alternative Term
Town	Top-level folder containing your individual projects. The gt binary manages projects under this folder.	Workspace
Rig	A project. It’s a folder tracked by a unique Git repository within your workspace.	Project
Overseer	The user (you). You have an “inbox” to receive notifications from agents in your projects.	User
Mayor	The managing agent for a project. Usually you send this agent messages, and it coordinates the work of other agents in the project.	Manager Agent
Polecat	Worker agent, taking commands from the mayor, doing some work, submitting a Merge Request, and then stopping.	Worker Agent
Refinery	Merge agent, who coordinates and makes decisions about merge requests coming from Worker Agents.	Merge Agent
Witness	Fixer agent, that watches the worker agents and tries to fix any that are stuck.	Fixer Agent
Deacon	Maintenance agent, runs a consistent workflow in a loop, unlike “worker agents” who do arbitrary tasks and then die.	Maintenance Manager Agent
Dogs	Maintenance worker agents who do cleanup tasks, directed by the Maintenance Agent.	Maintenance Worker Agents
Boot the Dog	Maintenance Manager checker agent, just checks on the Maintenance Manager Agent periodically to see if it needs a reboot or anything else.	Maintenance Manager Checker Agent
Crew	Persistent Worker Agents, which you talk to directly (not through the Mayor), and which persist after their tasks are done, to be reused. These are per-Project.	Persistent Worker Agents.
Beads	System for tracking work history across the system.	Work Tracker
Rig Beads	Project-specific work, tracked in the Work Tracker.	Project Work
Town Beads	Whole-workspace work, tracked in the Work Tracker.	Workspace Work