Gas Town

Gas Town is the toolkit I built to run my own coding-agent work, open-sourced on Jan 1st 2026. Gas Town is an early example of a "Dark Factory," a system where agents work together autonomously in the background.

Gas Town solves the hard problems that we faced with coding agents in 2025: durable memory, handoffs between sessions, parallel agents that don't step on each other, a clean record of what got done and what didn't. Gas Town is a cohesive set of moving parts that can run dozens of parallel agents, with purpose and oversight. Gas City takes it a step farther, splitting Gas Town into its component parts, reusable in an SDK for building your own orchestrators. Gas City can run hundreds of concurrent agents and can handle large enterprise AI automation scenarios.

I borrowed vocabulary from Mad Max in part for the theatricality, which helped establish Gas Town firmly as a 2026 cultural meme. But also in part because the names map well to Gas Town's Kubernetes-like orchestration shape: Polecats are workers, refineries serialize merges, a witness watches each rig, a mayor coordinates across rigs. "Cook a formula, sling it to a polecat, the witness watches, refinery merges." Naming the parts the way a mechanic would makes the system legible — both to the humans running it and to the agents working inside it.

Beads is is a portable work ledger. It can be used by itself, as a powerful tool for enhancing agent memory and building your own orchestrators. Beads is like adderall for your coding agent: it will keep the agent focused, no matter how many tasks you throw at it. At 23k GitHub stars and climbing, Beads has been a sensation.

The Beads ledger powers the Gas Town ecosystem (including the Wasteland and Gas City). In Beads, each unit of work — a task, a fix, a merge request, an agent's note to itself — is a bead, stored in a version-controlled database that's audit-trailed, queryable, and durable across sessions. Agents read and write the ledger; humans audit it. When a session crashes or hands off mid-task, the next session reads the beads and continues from there.

Beads predates everything else in the project — it shipped in October 2025, three months before Gas Town. Gas Town is one thing built on top of it; Gas City, the next-generation declarative orchestration toolkit, is another; the Wasteland federates Gas Towns over the same ledger. Beads is the common floor.

It also stands alone. Plenty of people pick up Beads just for the memory and persistence story without ever running Gas Town — it's the most-starred part of the project. Repository: github.com/gastownhall/beads.

Launched in March 2026, the Wasteland is what happens when you link Gas Towns together. It's a shared wanted board: post work that needs doing, claim work other people have posted, earn stamps from validators when you finish it. Stamps are multi-dimensional — quality, reliability, creativity — not just pass/fail. Over time they add up to a character sheet: a profile derived from real work, not self-reported.

Reputation in the Wasteland is portable. You can fork the commons, run your own wasteland, and take your stamps with you. The community hub is gastownhall.ai.

Eight words covering most of the moving parts.

Gas Town and Beads are MIT-licensed and live on GitHub at gastownhall/gastown and gastownhall/beads. The community is at gastownhall.ai.