Gas Town Emergency User Manual

Written twelve days after the Gas Town launch, when the safety warnings had been comprehensively ignored, fifty contributors had merged 44,000 lines of unreviewed code, and people were "cheering drunkenly on LinkedIn because Gas Town drained their bank account and did 10 projects overnight." Framed as an emergency manual for the early adopters who weren't supposed to be using the thing yet, it doubles as the first public articulation of the maintainer workflow that would carry the project to v1.0. Opens with a part-product-update, part-murder-mystery status report (the Deacon was cleaning up "stale" workers that weren't stale and murdering entire crews mid-task — the Gas Town Serial Killer Murder Mystery), then organizes the rest around the three nested dev loops from the Vibe Coding book (Outer days-to-weeks, Middle hours-to-days, Inner seconds-to-minutes) and the operational unit Steve discovered in practice: the Crew/Polecat split. Polecats are ephemeral unsupervised workers fed well-spec'd Beads epics; Crew are named, long-lived agents you cycle through for design and review, "Jeff-Bezos-style" — they present results to you one at a time. The PR Sheriff is a standing-orders bead pinned to a Crew member that on every session startup sorts open PRs into easy wins and human-review cases and slings the easy wins out for merge.

The closing move is Tending the Invisible Garden — code-review sweeps + bug-fix sweeps to stamp out heresies, the plausible- but-wrong beliefs about system design that agents make up, propagate through comments and docs, and then enforce. Fix is to capture guiding principles (Zero Framework Cognition, GUPP, MEOW, Discovery over Tracking) in agent priming so heresies have something to be pointed at when they crop up.