January 16, 2026
AI SimCity or cosplay? Grab your popcorn
Gas Town is a glimpse into the future
Vision or cosplay? Internet splits on Steve Yegge’s AI town
TLDR: Steve Yegge unveiled Gas Town, a whimsical “town” of AI helpers meant to spotlight platform-first thinking. The community is split between praising the vision and dismissing it as a rehash of 2023’s multi-bot experiments, with memes about mayors and polecats fueling a lively, why-does-this-matter debate.
Steve Yegge — the ex-Amazon engineer behind that viral Google memo — just launched Gas Town, a quirky “city” of AI workers with a Mayor, Polecats, a Witness, and a code Refinery, powered by his open-source beads. The crowd lit up immediately: half are calling it “genius performance art for developers,” the other half are yelling “been there, done that,” pointing to older multi-bot projects that tried similar things.
The loudest hot take? A curt drive-by: “MetaGPT was in… 2023?” which became the day’s meme, with posters slapping “2023 called, it wants its agents back” under every screenshot. Fans countered that Yegge’s track record with platform thinking — the same ethos that helped birth AWS — means Gas Town isn’t a toy; it’s a statement about building the platform first and making humans and bots use it end-to-end. Skeptics mocked the roleplay: “A Mayor handing commandments? Polecats doing sprints?” Cue SimCity mashups, Dungeons & Dragons alignment charts for each agent, and jokes about “LARPing as a CTO.”
Meanwhile, practical voices asked the real question: is this a tool you ship with, or an art piece to change how you think? Yegge’s own pitch leans toward the latter — and that’s exactly what’s fueling the drama: vision vs. utility, platform poetry vs. product reality. The popcorn is hot, and so are the comments.
Key Points
- •Steve Yegge launched Gas Town, a multi-agent harness backed by his open-source beads task-tracking system.
- •The article links Amazon’s 2002 API mandate to AWS’s later emergence and platform dominance, illustrating platform-first strategy.
- •Gas Town features defined agent roles (Mayor, The Witness, Polecats, Deacons) and a Refinery for merging code artifacts.
- •The author demonstrates a workflow by rigging multiple repositories (core runtime, admin dashboard, public API) into Gas Town using “gt rig add.”
- •A task is issued via “gt mayor attach” to inspect the public API and add core runtime flags to accounts in the admin dashboard, with agents producing a code artifact from the Refinery.