---
title: "Welcome to Gas Town"
description: "Gas Town turns 20–30 Claude instances into a Mad Max org chart. Elaborating an LLM metaphor is not the same as building useful machinery."
author: "Pau Friedman"
kind: "link"
published_at: "2026-01-21"
url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/01/21/welcome-to-gas-town"
markdown_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/01/21/welcome-to-gas-town.md"
canonical_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/01/21/welcome-to-gas-town"
external_url: "https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04"
---

# [Welcome to Gas Town](<https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04>)

Gas Town turns 20–30 Claude Code instances into a software company: Mayor, Deacon, Dogs, Witnesses,
Polecats, Refinery, Convoys, Beads, Hooks, and Seances. One agent reminds another agent to remind
the workers to work. Every model failure becomes an occasion to invent another anthropomorphic
management layer.

The charitable reading is experimental systems research. The less charitable one—and mine—is Claude
psychosis: mistaking the model’s willingness to sustain a metaphor for evidence that the metaphor
describes useful machinery. You can vibe-design a system forever; continued elaboration does not
prove that it works.