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pets vs cattle

Pets vs Cattle

A metaphor from the Kubernetes / cloud-native world. Pets are long-lived, individually named, and carefully maintained. Cattle are ephemeral, interchangeable, and disposable — if one dies you spin up another.

In Gas Town, agents are pets (persistent identities in Beads) while sessions are cattle (ephemeral Claude Code sessions thrown at persistent work).

Backlinks

Annotated version of 'Welcome to Gas Town'

In Gas Town, an Agent is not a session. Sessions are ephemeral; they are the “cattle” in the Kubernetes pets vs cattle metaphor. Claude Code sessions are the cattle that Gas Town throws at persistent work. That work all lives in Beads, along with the persistent identities of the workers, and the Town Mail, the event system, and even the ephemeral orchestration, as we will see.

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Glossary

Term Description Kind

Agent A persistent worker identity — the "pet" in pets vs cattle concept

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Term -- Agent

Agent: A persistent worker identity in Gas Town. An agent is not a session — it is the "pet" in the pets vs cattle metaphor. Agents have persistent identities stored as Agent Beads in Beads, and their work, mail, and state all live in Beads too.

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Term -- Session

Session: An ephemeral Claude Code session that Gas Town throws at persistent work. Sessions are the "cattle" in the pets vs cattle metaphor — disposable and interchangeable. The persistent identity and state belong to the agent, not the session.

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spaced repetition prompts - blog section 6 - Gastown Universal Propulsion Principle

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.
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pets vs cattle

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