A Mayor agent coordinates swarms of workers in git worktrees, and a Refinery agent merges their changes to main one at a time.
The summary describes what the project says it does; inclusion is not an endorsement.
Steve Yegge's orchestrator, built on Beads. In maintenance mode since v1.0 (April 2026); development moved to Gas City.
github.com · Issue #3570
“Two workers polling within the same window can both observe the same ready bead, both claim it, and both begin work. Result: duplicated work, near-identical PRs, wasted compute.”
Reported from an overnight Gas Town convoy, and closed the same day. A closed issue doesn't show that every variant of the race is gone.
youtube.com · 10:36
“now I think the bottleneck is around just creating the work.”
From Datopian's CTO, who uses Gas Town as his main orchestrator. Later in the episode, at about 18:05, he puts his time at roughly 80% planning and watching the agents and 20% debugging. Quoted from YouTube's auto-generated captions.
tenzinwangdhen.com · The Bad
“It turned out I had 141 orphaned claude code processes. The polecats were not being nuked correctly, so I needed to manually clean them up.”
He adds that this issue has been fixed since. Cleaning up runs is part of getting them right.
tenzinwangdhen.com · The Ugly
“I experienced this first hand when an agent overwrote a config file entirely. Thankfully it was recoverable via git.”
He kept Beads and worktrees but stopped using Gas Town: "I found it difficult to build a mental model of all of the moving parts."
tenzinwangdhen.com · The Bad
“The mail system (polecat → Mayor status) needed patching when I first used it, and seemed to break down mysteriously.”
He also writes that agents still needed manual prodding, and that when things broke he had to go into the worker sessions directly.
tenzinwangdhen.com · The Good
“Came back to find 6 PRs merged, and only one blocked on a dependency.”
He had handed out seven beads before dinner.
steve-yegge.medium.com · Opening paragraphs
“There were the serial killer sprees, viciously taking out random workers mid-job. (It's always the Deacon, the modern-day Butler in the Gas Town murder mysteries.)”
Supervisor agents can fail too. He presents these as early bugs, fixed before v1.0.
steve-yegge.medium.com · WARNING DANGER CAUTION
“Some bugs get fixed 2 or 3 times, and someone has to pick the winner. Other fixes get lost. Designs go missing and need to be redone.”
steve-yegge.medium.com · Gas Town 101, Witness
“Sometimes you will need to go hustle the polecats to get their MRs submitted, and then hustle the Refinery to deal with them.”
Even with a patrol role watching the workers, a person still pushes work through.
softwareengineeringdaily.com · Transcript, 0:47:57
“It's had stalled workers, runaway workers. I had to kill 320 Claude Code instances on my machine the other day.”
An orchestrator needs to reap processes, cap resources and watch for stalls. This is a first-hand statement, not a measurement.
softwareengineeringdaily.com · Transcript, 0:45:13
“The merge one is terrible, and it's why Gas Town has a refinery to try to basically have a dedicated role that knows how hard merges are and just redo them, right?”
softwareengineeringdaily.com · Transcript, 0:28:41
“Then one day a swarm took off and fixed all my bugs. I had like 30 Beads all like lined up to knock out. And I couldn't find them, and I panicked.”
The work was done, but the operator couldn't tell. A first-hand anecdote, not a benchmark; the episode doesn't say how many agents ran.
softwareengineeringdaily.com · Transcript, 0:28:41
“It's so wild because like 8 out of 10 get done, and 2 out of 10 get lost.”
A rough personal estimate. In the same answer he says lost designs sometimes have to be redone from scratch.
steve-yegge.medium.com · Gas Town 101, Refinery
“The baseline can change so much during a swarm that the final workers getting merged are trying to merge against an unrecognizable new head.”
Worktrees stop agents editing the same files at the same time. They don't stop conflicts at merge time.