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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

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