Welcome to Gas City

An announcement with a strange authorship problem. The software is Steve's vision down to the name, predicted and described in a January post, but Julian Knutsen and Chris Sells actually built it, so this is Steve celebrating his own succession: "exactly what I wished for," now run by "far more serious and disciplined engineers than me." The evangelism runs hot (the stack is "peerless," the auditing "unparalleled"), and a reader who skipped the earlier Gas essays will hit packs, polecats, MEOW, and formulas without a glossary. What grounds it all is the small worked example at the center: the approval queue for player-uploaded images in Steve's game Wyvern, staffed by a two-agent pack where one agent recommends and a second one acts, the second added "much like a second hash function" because any agent "can go temporarily insane, at any time."

The back half, "Escape From SaaS Mountain," is the part aimed past developers at boardrooms, and Steve credits much of it to Brendan Hopper of Commonwealth Bank of Australia: SaaS as a machine that pumps a cut of every dollar spent on it out of local economies and into California's, with even Atlassian unable to stay meaningfully Australian, and most customers paying full price for the 20% of features they use. The reporting is thin but real — an enterprise visit where non-technical staff were rebuilding a $30k/year SaaS tool in-house on Gas Town. Readers allergic to launch-day salesmanship can skip straight to that section; the economics stands on its own whether or not you ever install the thing.