Glossary
A comprehensive reference for Gas Town terminology, drawn from the documentation and Steve Yegge's articles on multi-agent AI orchestration.
Agents
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Mayor | The top-level orchestrator agent. Receives instructions from the human, breaks work into beads, creates convoys, and coordinates all other agents. You interact with Gas Town primarily through the Mayor. |
| Deacon | The background health coordinator. Monitors agent health, handles escalations, and coordinates recovery when agents crash. Named after a religious figure who keeps order. |
| Witness | Per-rig monitoring agent. Watches polecats, validates their work, detects crashes, and reports status. Inspired by Mad Max's "Witness me!" |
| Refinery | The merge queue agent. Processes completed work from polecats, rebasing and merging to main one at a time. Prevents merge chaos from parallel agents. |
| Polecats | Ephemeral worker agents. Spawn, claim a bead, execute a molecule, submit work, then exit. Named after the pole-swinging warriors in Mad Max. |
| Dogs | Cross-rig utility agents that handle tasks spanning multiple rigs (e.g., dependency updates, cross-project refactoring). |
| Crew | Human-paired agents for interactive, collaborative work sessions. Unlike polecats, crew agents are long-lived and maintain context with a human operator. |
| Boot | Triage agent that assesses incoming work, classifies complexity, and recommends assignment strategies. |
| Daemon | The background Go process that manages agent lifecycles, runs health checks, and provides the gt CLI interface. |
Core Concepts
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Bead | An atomic unit of tracked work — an issue, task, bug, or feature. Stored in git via the bd CLI. Beads are the fundamental work primitive in Gas Town. |
| Convoy | A batch of related beads that travel together. Created when the Mayor breaks a large request into individual tasks. Tracks overall progress of a batch. |
| Hook | A persistent pointer from an agent to its current bead. The hook is what makes Gas Town crash-safe — agents read their hook on startup to know what they were working on. |
| Molecule | A running instance of a multi-step workflow. Tracks which steps are done, in progress, or pending. Persists in beads so agents can resume after crashes. |
| Formula | A TOML-defined template for creating molecules. Formulas are blueprints; molecules are live instances. Gas Town ships with 30+ built-in formulas. |
| Gate | An async coordination primitive. A gate blocks a molecule step until a condition is met (e.g., "wait for code review approval" or "wait for dependent bead to complete"). |
| Rig | A project container wrapping a git repository. Each rig has its own set of polecats, a witness, and a refinery. A Gas Town workspace typically runs 2-5 rigs. |
| Town | The top-level workspace directory containing all rigs, the Mayor, the Deacon, and shared configuration. Typically located at ~/gt. |
| Worktree | A git worktree providing file-level isolation for each polecat. Each polecat gets its own worktree so agents never edit shared files simultaneously. |
| Wisp | A sub-bead — a lightweight tracking unit that represents a single step within a molecule. Ephemeral by default (not exported to JSONL). |
The asynchronous messaging system between agents. Messages are stored as beads and routed by address (e.g., mayor/, myrig/witness). | |
| Guzzoline | Slang for the specifications, plans, and designs that Crew members create. Polecats consume guzzoline — they execute the plans Crew produces. |
| DND | Do Not Disturb mode. When enabled, an agent suppresses non-critical notifications and nudges. Toggle with gt dnd. |
| Seance | A command (gt seance) that lets you query predecessor sessions for context, useful when picking up work from a crashed or cycled agent. |
The MEOW Stack
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| MEOW Stack | Molecules, Epics, Orchestration, Workflows — Gas Town's layered abstraction model. Each layer builds on the one below, from individual molecule steps up to full workflow orchestration. |
| Protomolecule | A higher-order orchestration pattern that coordinates multiple molecules working in parallel at the convoy level. |
| Pour | The act of creating a molecule instance from a formula template. "Pour the shiny formula" creates a new shiny molecule. |
| Squash | Compressing a completed molecule into a single digest bead. Used by patrol agents to keep the beads database clean. |
| Burn | Archiving a completed molecule. The molecule is marked done and no longer appears in active status. |
Design Principles
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| GUPP | Gas Town Universal Propulsion Principle — every operation must move the system forward or leave it unchanged. No operation should move backward. |
| NDI | Nondeterministic Idempotence — operations may produce different outputs each time (because AI is nondeterministic), but the system state after execution is equivalent. |
| Nudge | A synchronous message that interrupts an agent with new context or instructions. The escape hatch for stuck agents. |
| Let It Crash | Erlang-inspired philosophy: rather than preventing every failure, design for recovery. Polecats are expected to crash; the system handles it gracefully. |
| Discovery over Tracking | Agents observe reality each patrol cycle rather than maintaining fragile in-memory state. |
Operations
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Landing the Plane | The mandatory session completion workflow. Includes filing remaining work, running quality gates, updating issues, pushing to remote, and writing handoff notes. |
| Patrol | A recurring monitoring cycle. Witnesses, Refinery, and Deacon all run patrol molecules — looping through check-act cycles. |
| Escalation | A routing mechanism for problems that an agent cannot resolve on its own. Escalations travel up the agent hierarchy until someone (or the human) handles them. |
| Sling | Assigning a bead to an agent. gt sling gt-a1b2c myrig sends the bead to the specified rig for a polecat to pick up. |
| Feed | The live activity stream showing real-time events from all agents across all rigs. |
| Trail | A summary of recent activity, more condensed than the live feed. |
| Prime | Reloading an agent's full context from its CLAUDE.md file, hooks, and beads state. Run gt prime after compaction, crashes, or new sessions. |
| Handoff | Transferring context from one session to the next. Writes summary notes that the next session picks up automatically. |
| Park | Pausing a rig. The rig's agents stop, but state is preserved. gt rig park myrig. |
Software Survival 3.0
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Software Survival 3.0 | Steve Yegge's thesis that competitive selection pressure now favors teams that effectively use multi-agent AI. The third era of software selection pressure. |
| The 8 Stages | A maturity model for AI-assisted development, from Stage 1 (zero AI) through Stage 8 (building your own orchestrator). Gas Town targets Stage 7+ users. |
| Survival Formula | (Savings x Usage x H) / (Awareness + Friction) — the formula determining whether a software tool survives. |
| Plot Armor | A survival ratio so high (in the thousands) that a tool becomes effectively indestructible. No LLM will waste tokens re-synthesizing what the tool already does perfectly. grep is the canonical example. Extreme velocity from AI orchestration can provide plot armor. |
| Human Coefficient (H) | A multiplier in the survival formula representing human preference for human-made output. Higher H means the domain values human involvement, giving software in that domain an extra survival advantage beyond pure efficiency. |
Mad Max Naming
| Gas Town Term | Mad Max Origin | System Role |
|---|---|---|
| Gas Town | The oil refinery citadel | The workspace — central hub of operations |
| Mayor | Ruler of Gas Town | The coordinator who runs everything |
| Rig | War rig (armored truck) | A project being managed |
| Polecat | Warriors on poles raiding vehicles | Ephemeral workers doing quick tasks |
| Refinery | Where crude oil becomes fuel | Where code is merged to main |
| Witness | "Witness me!" (validation cry) | The monitor who watches and validates |
| Convoy | Group of vehicles traveling together | A batch of tasks moving through the system |
| Deacon | A religious authority figure | The health monitor who keeps order |
Usage Patterns
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Three Developer Loops | The nested feedback loops for Gas Town operations: Outer Loop (days-weeks, strategic planning), Middle Loop (hours-days, agent coordination), Inner Loop (minutes, task delegation and output review). |
| PR Sheriff | An ad-hoc Crew role with a permanent hook to manage pull requests. On each session startup, the PR Sheriff checks open PRs, classifies them by complexity, and slings easy wins to other Crew or polecats. |
| Vibe Coding | A development approach where you let the AI do the work while focusing on direction and review. Gas Town embraces vibe coding as a core philosophy -- tolerating some work loss in exchange for throughput. |
| Guzzoline | Slang for the specifications, plans, and design work that Crew members produce. Polecats consume this guzzoline to execute well-specified tasks. From the Mad Max fuel terminology. |
CLI Quick Reference
| Command | Purpose |
|---|---|
gt | The main Gas Town CLI |
bd | The Beads issue tracking CLI |
gt start | Start the Mayor and Deacon |
gt start --all | Start the full agent fleet |
gt down | Pause all agents (preserve state) |
gt shutdown | Full stop and cleanup |
gt mayor attach | Attach terminal to Mayor session |
gt sling <bead> <rig> | Assign work to a rig |
gt feed | Live activity stream |
gt trail | Recent activity summary |
gt doctor | System health check |
gt costs | Token usage and cost tracking |
gt prime | Reload agent context |
gt handoff | Write handoff notes |
gt nudge <agent> <msg> | Send sync message to agent |
gt mol status | Show current molecule progress |
gt formula run <name> | Pour a formula into a molecule |
gt may at | Attach to Mayor (short for gt mayor attach) |
gt crew at <rig> <name> | Attach to a Crew workspace |
gt rig park <rig> | Pause a rig (preserve state, stop agents) |
gt rig unpark <rig> | Resume a parked rig |
gt escalate <msg> | Create an escalation for problems agents cannot resolve |
gt polecat list | List active polecats across rigs |
gt mail inbox | Check your inbox |
gt done | Signal work ready for merge queue |