Welcome to Gas Town

A launch post that spends its entire first act trying to drive the reader away. Before explaining anything, Steve rates the three-week-old codebase somewhere between "uncut rough" and a smuggling joke, admits the whole thing is vibe coded and he has never once read the source, then produces an eight-stage chart of the AI-coding evolution so you can verify you are not ready for what follows (below Stage 7, he insists, you are not). Readers who stay get a genuine operator's manual: agent roles named out of Mad Max, Waterworld, and Slow Horses; work handled like fish slopped into barrels, some of which escape back to sea; a command called gt seance that lets a worker hold a séance with its dead predecessor; and a workflow algebra Steve says feels "more of a discovery than an invention." The software underneath was seventeen days old at publication — 75k lines, 2,000 commits.

It is dense going. The essay calls itself a textbook and apologizes for it, and a reader who never touched Beads will hit words like "wisp" and "guzzoline" without much of a handrail; the discussion links on this page run from sympathetic close-reading to open hostility, which tells you how it landed. But this is the reference document the rest of the 2026 arc leans on, and near the end it turns unexpectedly personal: a report of what happened when Steve showed the sketch to Anthropic, some strange offers arriving in his inbox, and a story about a panda that explains what he intends to do next.