spaced repetition prompts - blog section 4 - Gas Town 101
^ spaced repetition prompts - blog section 4 - Gas Town 101
Blog Post -- Section 4 - Gas Town 101
What are the two types of coding workers in Gas Town? ? Polecats (ephemeral) and The Crew (long-lived).
What does The Town orchestrate? ? All agents — workers, patrols, and management — across all Rigs.
Where does The Town live on disk?
?
A directory like ~/gt, with project Rigs underneath it.
What is The Town implemented as?
?
A Go binary called gt, kept in its own repo.
How does a Rig relate to a git repo? ? Each Rig is a git repo placed under Town management.
Which roles are per-rig? ? Witness, Polecats, Refinery, and Crew.
Which roles are town-level? ? Mayor, Deacon, and Dogs.
What distinguishes The Overseer from all other Gas Town roles? ? The Overseer is the only human — everyone else is an agent.
How does The Overseer communicate with agents? ? Through Town Mail, via their own Inbox.
Why do you talk to The Mayor more than other agents? ? It's your concierge and chief-of-staff — it kicks off work Convoys and reports back when they finish.
What do Polecats produce? ? Merge Requests (MRs).
How do Polecats lifecycles differ from The Crew lifecycles? ? Polecats are ephemeral and decommissioned after their MR merges. Crew members are long-lived with persistent identities.
What happens to Polecats after their MR is merged? ? They are fully decommissioned, though their names are recycled.
What about a Polecats remains, even after they are decommissioned? ? Their name remains, and is recycled
Who do Witnesses watch over? ? The Polecats.
Why do you need a Witness? ? When enough Polecats are swarming, some get stuck and need to be hustled along.
What problem does the Refinery solve? ? The Merge Queue problem — workers conflicting over rebasing/merging when swarming.
Why is merging hard when Polecats swarm? ? The baseline changes so much that late mergers face an unrecognizable new head and may need to completely reimplement.
How does the Refinery merge changes? ? One at a time
What kind of loop does The Deacon run? ? A patrol — a well-defined workflow it repeats continuously.
How does The Deacon keep Gas Town running? ? It receives a "Do Your Job" (DYFJ) signal every couple minutes and propagates it downward to other workers.
How do Dogs relate to The Deacon? ? They're The Deacon's personal crew, handling maintenance and handyman tasks so the Deacon stays focused on its patrol.
Why were Dogs added? ? The Deacon's patrol got overloaded with responsibilities and needed helpers to stay focused.
What does Boot the Dog decide every 5 minutes? ? Whether The Deacon needs a heartbeat, a nudge, a restart, or to be left alone.
Why does Boot the Dog exist instead of the daemon pinging The Deacon directly? ? The daemon kept interrupting The Deacon with heartbeats and pep talks — Boot absorbs that so the Deacon can focus.
How do The Crew differ from Polecats in terms of management? ? Crew work directly for the Overseer, not managed by The Witness. Polecats are managed by the Witness.
What kind of work are The Crew best suited for? ? Design work with lots of back-and-forth.
What does "graceful degradation" mean in Gas Town? ? Every worker can operate independently. You can run whichever parts you want, even in "no-tmux" mode with plain Claude Code sessions.
Which characters do Patrols? ? The Deacon and The Witness
In Gas Town, which is more enduring... an agent or a session? ? The agent. An agent is the persistent identity (the "pet"); a session is the ephemeral Claude Code process thrown at work (the "cattle"). Sessions come and go, but the agent endures.
If a Claude Code session crashes mid-task, what survives — the agent or the session? ? The agent. Its identity, state, and work live in Beads. The session is disposable cattle — just spin up another one.
How does an agent endure an environment crash? ? The agent's identity, state, and work live in Beads, which is git-backed.
Next section: section 6 - Gastown Universal Propulsion Principle