explaingit

gastownhall/gastown

Analysis updated 2026-06-24 · repo last pushed 2026-05-21

15,152GoAudience · vibe coderComplexity · 4/5MaintainedSetup · hard

TLDR

Gas Town is a workspace manager for orchestrating many AI coding agents like Claude Code, Copilot, and Codex at once, with git-backed state and a merge queue.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((gastown))
    Inputs
      Git repos
      Bead work items
      Molecule TOML
    Outputs
      Agent work commits
      Merge queue
      Convoy batches
    Use Cases
      Run many agents in parallel
      Coordinate Claude Code teams
      Track agent tasks
    Tech Stack
      Go
      Git worktrees
      Dolt
      SQLite
      tmux
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Code map

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What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Run 20 coding agents in parallel against one git repo without stepping on each other.

USE CASE 2

Use Claude Code as a Mayor that coordinates worker Polecat agents on smaller tasks.

USE CASE 3

Define a multi-step TOML workflow Molecule and have agents execute it as a pipeline.

USE CASE 4

Link two Gas Town instances over DoltHub so they can hand work to each other.

What is it built with?

GoGitDoltSQLitetmux

How does it compare?

gastownhall/gastowntxthinking/brookgoogleapis/mcp-toolbox
Stars15,15215,11615,197
LanguageGoGoGo
Last pushed2026-05-21
MaintenanceMaintained
Setup difficultyhardmoderatemoderate
Complexity4/53/53/5
Audiencevibe coderops devopsdeveloper

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · hard Time to first run · 1h+

Needs Go 1.25+, Dolt, beads, sqlite3, tmux, and the Claude Code CLI plus a working git setup before anything runs.

License not stated in the README, check the LICENSE file in the repo before redistributing.

In plain English

Gas Town is a workspace manager for running and coordinating many AI coding agents at once. The README pitches it as a way to run Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Gemini, and similar tools side by side on different tasks, with the work they do persisted to disk so that nothing is lost when an agent restarts or its session ends. The stated goal is to scale comfortably from a handful of agents up to twenty or thirty without the setup collapsing into chaos. The project leans hard into a small-town metaphor for its concepts. Your workspace directory, usually at ~/gt/, is called a Town. Each project inside the Town is a Rig, which wraps a single git repository and the agents attached to it. A Crew Member is your own workspace inside a rig, while Polecats are worker agents spawned to do tasks. Sitting above all of this is The Mayor, a Claude Code instance described as the primary coordinator that knows the full context of your workspace and that you talk to first. Work history and state are stored in Hooks, which are git worktrees used as persistent storage that survives crashes and restarts. Work itself is tracked with two further concepts. Beads are individual work items, with IDs like gt-abc12, stored by a separate tool called beads (bd) as the git-backed ledger. Convoys bundle beads assigned to agents, with a mountain label that turns on stall detection for long-running epics. Workflow templates called Molecules define multi-step pipelines in TOML. Gas Town has a three-tier watchdog setup. A Witness monitors the polecats inside one rig, the Deacon runs continuous background patrols across all rigs, and Dogs are workers the Deacon dispatches for maintenance. A per-rig Refinery acts as a merge queue, batching merge requests, running verification gates, and merging to main using a Bors-style bisecting queue. Agents that hit blockers can escalate at three severity levels. A Scheduler caps concurrent dispatch to avoid API rate limits. Installation needs Go 1.25 or later, Git 2.25 or later, the Dolt database, the beads tool, sqlite3, tmux, and the Claude Code CLI by default. Installation is offered through Homebrew, npm, building from source, or Docker Compose. A Wasteland feature links separate Gas Towns through DoltHub so they can post and claim work between each other. The full README is longer than what was shown.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Install Gas Town on macOS with Homebrew including Dolt, beads, tmux, and the Claude Code CLI, and initialize a Town at ~/gt.
Prompt 2
Set up a Rig wrapping my existing GitHub repo and spawn three Polecat agents to work in parallel on different beads.
Prompt 3
Write a Molecule TOML that runs lint, test, and refactor steps as a pipeline of agent tasks.
Prompt 4
Configure the Refinery merge queue with a Bors-style bisecting queue for my repo.
Prompt 5
Use the Wasteland feature to share work between two Gas Town instances through DoltHub.

Frequently asked questions

What is gastown?

Gas Town is a workspace manager for orchestrating many AI coding agents like Claude Code, Copilot, and Codex at once, with git-backed state and a merge queue.

What language is gastown written in?

Mainly Go. The stack also includes Go, Git, Dolt.

Is gastown actively maintained?

Maintained — commit in last 6 months (last push 2026-05-21).

What license does gastown use?

License not stated in the README, check the LICENSE file in the repo before redistributing.

How hard is gastown to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated hard, with roughly 1h+ to a first successful run.

Who is gastown for?

Mainly vibe coder.

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