Run a swarm. Keep control.
GasTown coordinates specialized agents, persistent work items, and merge-safe execution — so you can ship faster without losing accountability, budget, or clarity.
How we're different
- Roles you can reason about (Mayor, Witness, Polecats, Refinery).
- Work state lives outside the chat (Beads), so sessions stay disposable.
- Merge queue + budget caps are first-class — not afterthoughts.
What breaks at swarm scale
Design becomes the bottleneck
When code is cheap, clarity is expensive. GasTown keeps intent visible with queues, review gates, and decision logs.
Context rot
Long-running sessions degrade. GasTown externalizes state into Beads and treats sessions as disposable workers.
Merge conflicts + drift
Parallel work creates collisions. GasTown uses a Refinery merge queue and staged diffs to keep changes small and landable.
The town roles
Mayor concierge
Human-facing coordinator. Decomposes goals into Beads, assigns roles, and keeps the plan coherent.
Witness supervisor
Unblocks workers, enforces checklists, and requests clarifications when intent is underspecified.
Polecats workers
Disposable specialist sessions that do one job (add tests, fix a bug, refactor a module) and report back.
Refinery merge queue
Stages diffs, resolves conflicts, and ensures every change is verified before landing.
Archivist audit
Maintains an immutable trace: who did what, what evidence exists, and what was approved.
Boot (the dog) nudges
Keeps the swarm fed. Heartbeats workers to check their queues and escalates stalled Beads.
Beads + seancing
Beads = persistent units of work
Each bead is a small JSON task with an owner, status, evidence links, and acceptance criteria.
Seancing = restart without losing state
Spin up a fresh session and have it interrogate the last run: what happened, what’s stuck, what’s next.
Queues + heartbeat
Hooks keep agents moving
Every role has a queue and a “next hook”. Workers pull the next bead and publish progress continuously.
Guardrails prevent runaway loops
Budgets, retry limits, and review gates stop expensive thrash and make work predictable.
Example workflow: fix a production bug
- Mayor creates Beads: reproduce, fix, add tests, document.
- Polecats implement small diffs; Witness reviews against acceptance criteria.
- Refinery stages diffs, runs the verification harness, and lands changes in order.
- Archivist records evidence: logs, screenshots, test runs, approvals.
Start a pilot (internal)
We’ll configure roles, hooks, budgets, and a verification harness for one repo and one workflow.