It’s a very low bar to stumble over, but absolutely, I think the work you sign off and publish should have a connection to reality. I say this as someone who is something of an “AI enjoyer”.

That’s definitely where the Letta value prop shines (amongst the core product features!). I think Claude Pro is not enough Claude, and Max is too much Claude. I pay somewhere between the two price points generally and get Just Enough Claude.

Ok, Gas Town is attempting to solve the problem of how do you scale your use of coding agents beyond the limit of direct human control. Because there’s a limit to how many Claudes you can manage as a squishy meat sack. Maybe it’s 5. Maybe you’re built different and it’s 9. There’s a limit.

Whatever you turn your mind to, really. It’s billed as a general purpose harness for coding agents. You point it at some sufficiently large software project and go wild.

Inception-like, it’s being used upon itself, as an example of a large software project. @stevejsteiner.bsky.social put it well.

Norvid teased a 3 bisk summary from me (for better or worse).

The problem being solved is solid - but it’s hard to get people to engage with the ideas involved when they’re doing Fury Road cosplay.

Also more practically model densing laws mean that Gas Town is coming for all of us sooner or later.

Weirdly that part gives me the least friction - you are so deep down the rabbit hole at this point that the decision on the economics of “a junior dev’s worth of Claude tokens” is between you and God.

That’s literally it. There’s a bunch more detail in there with characters like “Deacon” and “The Boot”. At one point there’s also a crossover with Mick Herron’s Slough Horses universe.

I got it in under the 3 bisks. Oh, and the polecats? They’re the Claude workers building features and squashing bugs. In the blog posts, they are anthropomorphised polecats (the animal), but their canonical inspiration is these fellows from the source material.

Hilarity may, or may not, ensue. What will ensue is an impressively large Claude bill, and a second holiday home for the Amodeis.

Gas Town is Mad Max-themed Dwarf Fortress applied to the software delivery lifecycle. It is designed to let a large number of Claudes work on the same project at once, burning through the feature backlog as fast as you can feed it.

Steve is bold enough to ask “What if the solution to this problem didn’t come from organisational control theory? What if the solution didn’t come from agent-based computational economics? What if the solution came from this?”

Ok, Gas Town is attempting to solve the problem of how do you scale your use of coding agents beyond the limit of direct human control. Because there’s a limit to how many Claudes you can manage as a squishy meat sack. Maybe it’s 5. Maybe you’re built different and it’s 9. There’s a limit.

Like most of Steve’s posts it gets a solid 10/10 from me for entertainment. It’s just difficult to have serious conversations with people about how it affects a multi-thousand strong engineering workforce when the source material looks like this.

See, my literalist brain sees this and goes “Ok! Let’s explain what Gas Town is!” The rest of me is desperately trying to wrestle the virtual keyboard away while exclaiming “What are you doing man? You’re on the precipice of a 10-bisk LinkedIn thread!”