Welcome to Gas City

Gas City is Gas Town torn apart and rewritten as an SDK for building your own dark factories — composable, declarative packs that let you assemble any agent topology you want, deploy it, and watch a supervisor plane keep it running while you observe from a rich console (or tmux). It ships with a Gas Town pack that runs an exact replica of the original, so it's a drop-in replacement. Steve flags up front that he didn't write it: Julian Knutsen and Chris Sells did, and v1.0 shipped the same week. Dark factories started as a faster way to write code; Steve sees them headed for infrastructure, operations, and core business processes. He extends his 8 Stages of AI Adoption chart from Gas Town to eleven (Shepherd, Pack Maintainer, Factory Builder at the top) and introduces the Light Factory: a dark factory designed with the lights deliberately on, every agent addressable and observable.

The back half — credited heavily to Brendan Hopper at Commonwealth Bank of Australia — is "Escape from SaaS Mountain": SaaS as an extraction machine streaming money into California (Atlassian Delaware-registered, NASDAQ-traded, half its devs U.S.-based), and Gas City as the de-SaaSer that finally makes Build-and-Maintain pragmatic at the bottom of the pyramid. The thesis is that three to five engineers running Gas City packs can credibly replace seven-figure SaaS bills, with the Dolt git-versioned audit trail a better SOC2 story than most SaaS vendors can produce on request.