gastownhall/gastown

Gas Town

Multi-agent orchestration system for Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and other AI agents with persistent work tracking

Overview

Gas Town is a workspace manager that lets you coordinate multiple AI coding agents (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Gemini, and others) working on different tasks. Instead of losing context when agents restart, Gas Town persists work state in git-backed hooks, enabling reliable multi-agent workflows.

What Problem Does This Solve?

Architecture

graph TB
    Mayor[The Mayor<br/>AI Coordinator]
    Town[Town Workspace<br/>~/gt/]

    Town --> Mayor
    Town --> Rig1[Rig: Project A]
    Town --> Rig2[Rig: Project B]

    Rig1 --> Crew1[Crew Member<br/>Your workspace]
    Rig1 --> Hooks1[Hooks<br/>Persistent storage]
    Rig1 --> Polecats1[Polecats<br/>Worker agents]

    Rig2 --> Crew2[Crew Member]
    Rig2 --> Hooks2[Hooks]
    Rig2 --> Polecats2[Polecats]

    Hooks1 -.git worktree.-> GitRepo1[Git Repository]
    Hooks2 -.git worktree.-> GitRepo2[Git Repository]

    style Mayor fill:#e1f5ff,color:#000000
    style Town fill:#f0f0f0,color:#000000
    style Rig1 fill:#fff4e1,color:#000000
    style Rig2 fill:#fff4e1,color:#000000

Core Concepts

The Mayor 🎩

Your primary AI coordinator. The Mayor is a Claude Code instance with full context about your workspace, projects, and agents. Start here - just tell the Mayor what you want to accomplish.

Town 🏘️

Your workspace directory (e.g., ~/gt/). Contains all projects, agents, and configuration.

Rigs 🏗️

Project containers. Each rig wraps a git repository and manages its associated agents.

Crew Members 👤

Your personal workspace within a rig. Where you do hands-on work.

Polecats 🦨

Worker agents with persistent identity but ephemeral sessions. Spawned for tasks, sessions end on completion, but identity and work history persist.

Hooks 🪝

Git worktree-based persistent storage for agent work. Survives crashes and restarts.

Convoys 🚚

Work tracking units. Bundle multiple beads that get assigned to agents. Convoys labeled mountain get autonomous stall detection and smart skip logic for epic-scale execution.

Beads Integration 📿

Git-backed issue tracking system that stores work state as structured data.

Bead IDs (also called issue IDs) use a prefix + 5-character alphanumeric format (e.g., gt-abc12, hq-x7k2m). The prefix indicates the item's origin or rig. Commands like gt sling and gt convoy accept these IDs to reference specific work items. The terms "bead" and "issue" are used interchangeably—beads are the underlying data format, while issues are the work items stored as beads.

Molecules 🧬

Workflow templates that coordinate multi-step work. Formulas (TOML definitions) are instantiated as molecules with tracked steps. Two modes: root-only wisps (steps materialized at runtime, lightweight) and poured wisps (steps materialized as sub-wisps with checkpoint recovery). See Molecules.

Monitoring: Witness, Deacon, Dogs 🐕

A three-tier watchdog system keeps agents healthy:

• Witness - Per-rig lifecycle manager. Monitors polecats, detects stuck agents, triggers recovery, manages session cleanup.
• Deacon - Background supervisor running continuous patrol cycles across all rigs.
• Dogs - Infrastructure workers dispatched by the Deacon for maintenance tasks (e.g., Boot for triage).

Refinery 🏭

Per-rig merge queue processor. When polecats complete work via gt done, the Refinery batches merge requests, runs verification gates, and merges to main using a Bors-style bisecting queue. Failed MRs are isolated and either fixed inline or re-dispatched.

Escalation 🚨

Severity-routed issue escalation. Agents that hit blockers escalate via gt escalate, which creates tracked beads routed through the Deacon, Mayor, and (if needed) Overseer. Severity levels: CRITICAL (P0), HIGH (P1), MEDIUM (P2). See Escalation.

Scheduler ⏱️

Config-driven capacity governor for polecat dispatch. Prevents API rate limit exhaustion by batching dispatch under configurable concurrency limits. Default is direct dispatch; set scheduler.max_polecats to enable deferred dispatch with the daemon. See Scheduler.

Seance 👻

Session discovery and continuation. Discovers previous agent sessions via .events.jsonl logs, enabling agents to query their predecessors for context and decisions from earlier work.

gt seance                       # List discoverable predecessor sessions
gt seance --talk <id> -p "What did you find?"  # One-shot question

Wasteland 🏜️

Federated work coordination network linking Gas Towns through DoltHub. Rigs post wanted items, claim work from other towns, submit completion evidence, and earn portable reputation via multi-dimensional stamps. See Wasteland.

New to Gas Town? See the Glossary for a complete guide to terminology and concepts.

Installation

Choose one of the two setup paths below: install Gas Town on your host, or run it inside a Docker container.

Prerequisites

Native installs require the host tools below. Docker installs only require Docker Compose on the host; the image supplies Go, Dolt, bd, tmux, and CLI utilities inside the container. The platform steps below say when a path installs gt, bd, and dolt for you and when you install them separately.

Local setup

Install the prerequisites listed above, then install gt for your platform.

Install gt on macOS

Homebrew installs gt, bd, and dolt together.

brew install gastown

Avoid go install on macOS. The unsigned binary it produces gets killed by Gatekeeper. To build from source, install Dolt and ICU4C with Homebrew, install bd with Go, then build and install gt with make install. Put $HOME/.local/bin and $HOME/go/bin ahead of any stale binary locations on your PATH so the freshly installed gt and bd take precedence.

brew install dolt icu4c
go install github.com/steveyegge/beads/cmd/bd@latest
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$HOME/go/bin:$PATH"
git clone https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown.git
cd gastown
make install

Install gt on Linux

Install Dolt by following the Dolt installation guide, then install gt and bd with go install.

go install github.com/steveyegge/gastown/cmd/gt@latest
go install github.com/steveyegge/beads/cmd/bd@latest

Prepend the Go binary directory to your PATH if it is not already there, so freshly installed gt and bd binaries take precedence over stale copies. Append to ~/.zshrc instead if you use zsh.

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/go/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Install gt on Windows

Install Dolt first by following the Dolt installation guide. Unlike the macOS Homebrew path, go install does not install Dolt. Then install gt and bd with go install.

go install github.com/steveyegge/gastown/cmd/gt@latest
go install github.com/steveyegge/beads/cmd/bd@latest

Both binaries land in %USERPROFILE%\go\bin\. Put that directory before older gt or bd install locations on PATH, then open a new shell for the change to take effect.

Native Windows source builds that compile the ICU-backed query layer need an MSYS2 UCRT64 or MinGW64 shell with matching icu, toolchain, and pkg-config packages; the repository's Windows CI uses pacboy -S icu:p toolchain:p pkg-config:p. Plain PowerShell/MSVC is not enough for that CGO build.

For full tmux-backed workflows on Windows, use WSL or another Linux environment. Native Windows shells are best treated as minimal CLI-only environments.

Create your workspace

Run gt install to create your headquarters (HQ) at ~/gt. The --shell flag installs shell integration and enables Gas Town globally. The --git flag initializes the HQ as a git repository. Before using --git, set git config --global user.name and git config --global user.email so the initial commit has a valid identity.

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
gt install ~/gt --shell --git
cd ~/gt

Start the long-lived services. gt up boots Dolt, the daemon, the Deacon, the Mayor, and per-rig Witnesses and Refineries.

gt up

Verify the install. The --fix flag clears the warnings that gt install does not preempt.

gt doctor --fix

Add a project

Use gt rig add to clone a repository into your HQ as a rig.

gt rig add myproject https://github.com/you/repo.git

Rig names accept letters, digits, and underscores. Hyphens, dots, spaces, and path separators are not allowed. Use my_project instead of my-project.

To set a custom beads prefix for the rig, pass --prefix.

gt rig add myproject https://github.com/you/repo.git --prefix mp

Create your crew workspace

A crew workspace is a personal git clone where you do hands-on work.

gt crew add yourname --rig myproject
cd myproject/crew/yourname

Start the Mayor

The Mayor coordinates work across rigs.

gt mayor attach

Docker Compose setup

docker-compose.yml runs Gas Town inside a sandbox container. The container hosts an HQ at /gt, which Compose bind-mounts from ${FOLDER} on the host. The entrypoint runs gt install /gt --git against that directory on first start, so FOLDER must point at an empty directory that you want to become the HQ or an existing Gas Town HQ. Set GIT_USER and GIT_EMAIL so git and Dolt commits do not use the default test identity. See the full Docker guide for lifecycle, storage, and security details.

export GIT_USER="<your name>"
export GIT_EMAIL="<your email>"
export FOLDER="/path/to/empty/dir"   # empty directory or existing Gas Town HQ
export DASHBOARD_PORT=8080           # optional, host port for the dashboard

mkdir -p "$FOLDER"
docker compose build              # only needed on first run or after code changes
docker compose up -d
docker compose logs -f gastown    # wait for "HQ created successfully!", then Ctrl-C

docker compose exec gastown zsh   # or bash

Inside the container, finish bootstrapping.

gt enable                         # enable Gas Town global state
gt shell install                  # install shell integration
gt up --restore                   # start services and restore worker settings
gh auth login                     # optional: required for private GitHub rigs
gt mayor attach

The dashboard port is exposed from the container to the host. Treat it as a trusted local-network surface, and do not point FOLDER at a host workspace that a native gt install is using at the same time.

Quick Start Guide

Getting Started

Run

git config --global user.name "Your Name" &&
git config --global user.email "[email protected]" &&
gt install ~/gt --shell --git &&
cd ~/gt &&
gt up &&
gt doctor --fix &&
gt config agent list &&
gt mayor attach

and tell the Mayor what you want to build!

---

Basic Workflow

sequenceDiagram
    participant You
    participant Mayor
    participant Convoy
    participant Agent
    participant Hook

    You->>Mayor: Tell Mayor what to build
    Mayor->>Convoy: Create convoy with beads
    Mayor->>Agent: Sling bead to agent
    Agent->>Hook: Store work state
    Agent->>Agent: Complete work
    Agent->>Convoy: Report completion
    Mayor->>You: Summary of progress

Example: Feature Development

# 1. Start the Mayor
gt mayor attach

# 2. In Mayor session, create a convoy with bead IDs
gt convoy create "Feature X" gt-abc12 gt-def34 --notify --human

# 3. Assign work to an agent
gt sling gt-abc12 myproject

# 4. Track progress
gt convoy list

# 5. Monitor agents
gt agents

Common Workflows

Mayor Workflow (Recommended)

Best for: Coordinating complex, multi-issue work

flowchart LR
    Start([Start Mayor]) --> Tell[Tell Mayor<br/>what to build]
    Tell --> Creates[Mayor creates<br/>convoy + agents]
    Creates --> Monitor[Monitor progress<br/>via convoy list]
    Monitor --> Done{All done?}
    Done -->|No| Monitor
    Done -->|Yes| Review[Review work]

Commands:

# Attach to Mayor
gt mayor attach

# In Mayor, create convoy and let it orchestrate
gt convoy create "Auth System" gt-x7k2m gt-p9n4q --notify

# Track progress
gt convoy list

Minimal Mode (No Tmux)

Run individual runtime instances manually. Gas Town just tracks state.

gt convoy create "Fix bugs" gt-abc12   # Create convoy (sling auto-creates if skipped)
gt sling gt-abc12 myproject            # Assign to worker
claude --resume                        # Agent reads mail, runs work (Claude)
# or: codex                            # Start Codex in the workspace
gt convoy list                         # Check progress

Beads Formula Workflow

Best for: Predefined, repeatable processes

Formulas are TOML-defined workflows embedded in the gt binary (source in internal/formula/formulas/).

Example Formula (internal/formula/formulas/release.formula.toml):

description = "Standard release process"
formula = "release"
version = 1

[vars.version]
description = "The semantic version to release (e.g., 1.2.0)"
required = true

[[steps]]
id = "bump-version"
title = "Bump version"
description = "Run ./scripts/bump-version.sh {{version}}"

[[steps]]
id = "run-tests"
title = "Run tests"
description = "Run make test"
needs = ["bump-version"]

[[steps]]
id = "build"
title = "Build"
description = "Run make build"
needs = ["run-tests"]

[[steps]]
id = "create-tag"
title = "Create release tag"
description = "Run git tag -a v{{version}} -m 'Release v{{version}}'"
needs = ["build"]

[[steps]]
id = "publish"
title = "Publish"
description = "Run ./scripts/publish.sh"
needs = ["create-tag"]

Execute:

# List available formulas
bd formula list

# Run a formula with variables
bd cook release --var version=1.2.0

# Create formula instance for tracking
bd mol pour release --var version=1.2.0

Manual Convoy Workflow

Best for: Direct control over work distribution

# Create convoy manually
gt convoy create "Bug Fixes" --human

# Add issues to existing convoy
gt convoy add hq-cv-abc gt-m3k9p gt-w5t2x

# Assign to specific agents
gt sling gt-m3k9p myproject/my-agent

# Check status
gt convoy show

Runtime Configuration

Gas Town supports multiple AI coding runtimes. Per-rig runtime settings are in settings/config.json.

{
  "runtime": {
    "provider": "codex",
    "command": "codex",
    "args": [],
    "prompt_mode": "none"
  }
}

Notes:

• Claude uses hooks in .claude/settings.json (managed via --settings flag) for mail injection and startup.
• For Codex, set project_doc_fallback_filenames = ["CLAUDE.md"] in ~/.codex/config.toml so role instructions are picked up.
• For runtimes without hooks (e.g., Codex), Gas Town sends a startup fallback after the session is ready: gt prime, optional gt mail check --inject for autonomous roles, and gt nudge deacon session-started.
• GitHub Copilot (copilot) is a built-in preset using --yolo for autonomous mode. It uses executable lifecycle hooks in .github/hooks/gastown.json (same events as Claude: sessionStart, userPromptSubmitted, preToolUse, sessionEnd). Uses a 5-second ready delay instead of prompt detection. Requires a Copilot seat and org-level CLI policy. See docs/INSTALLING.md.

Key Commands

Workspace Management

gt install <path>           # Initialize workspace
gt rig add <name> <repo>    # Add project
gt rig list                 # List projects
gt crew add <name> --rig <rig>  # Create crew workspace

Agent Operations

gt agents                   # List active agents
gt sling <bead-id> <rig>    # Assign work to agent
gt sling <bead-id> <rig> --agent cursor   # Override runtime for this sling/spawn
gt mayor attach             # Start Mayor session
gt mayor start --agent auggie           # Run Mayor with a specific agent alias
gt prime                    # Context recovery (run inside existing session)
gt feed                     # Real-time activity feed (TUI)
gt feed --problems          # Start in problems view (stuck agent detection)

Built-in agent presets: claude, gemini, codex, kiro, cursor, auggie, amp, opencode, copilot, pi, omp

The kiro preset launches kiro-cli chat --trust-all-tools, supports Kiro's documented --resume / --resume-id session flags, and does not install Kiro hooks or .kiro project files.

Convoy (Work Tracking)

gt convoy create <name> [issues...]   # Create convoy with issues
gt convoy list              # List all convoys
gt convoy show [id]         # Show convoy details
gt convoy add <convoy-id> <issue-id...>  # Add issues to convoy

Configuration

# Set custom agent command
gt config agent set claude-glm "claude-glm --model glm-4"
gt config agent set codex-low "codex --thinking low"

# Set default agent
gt config default-agent claude-glm

Monitoring & Health

gt escalate -s HIGH "description"  # Escalate a blocker
gt escalate list               # List open escalations
gt scheduler status            # Show scheduler state
gt seance                      # Discover previous sessions
gt seance --talk <id>          # Query a predecessor session

Beads Integration

bd formula list             # List formulas
bd cook <formula>           # Execute formula
bd mol pour <formula>       # Create trackable instance
bd mol list                 # List active instances

Wasteland Federation

gt wl join <remote>            # Join a wasteland
gt wl browse                   # View wanted board
gt wl claim <id>               # Claim work
gt wl done <id> --evidence <url>  # Submit completion

Cooking Formulas

Gas Town includes built-in formulas for common workflows. See internal/formula/formulas/ for available recipes.

Activity Feed

gt feed launches an interactive terminal dashboard for monitoring all agent activity in real-time. It combines beads activity, agent events, and merge queue updates into a three-panel TUI:

• Agent Tree - Hierarchical view of all agents grouped by rig and role
• Convoy Panel - In-progress and recently-landed convoys
• Event Stream - Chronological feed of creates, completions, slings, nudges, and more

gt feed                      # Launch TUI dashboard
gt feed --problems           # Start in problems view
gt feed --plain              # Plain text output (no TUI)
gt feed --window             # Open in dedicated tmux window
gt feed --since 1h           # Events from last hour

Navigation: j/k to scroll, Tab to switch panels, 1/2/3 to jump to a panel, ? for help, q to quit.

Problems View

At scale (20-50+ agents), spotting stuck agents in the activity stream becomes difficult. The problems view surfaces agents needing human intervention by analyzing structured beads data.

Press p in gt feed (or start with gt feed --problems) to toggle the problems view, which groups agents by health state:

Intervention keys (in problems view): n to nudge the selected agent, h to handoff (refresh context).

Dashboard

Gas Town includes a web dashboard for monitoring your workspace. The dashboard must be run from inside a Gas Town workspace (HQ) directory.

# Start dashboard (default port 8080)
gt dashboard

# Start on a custom port
gt dashboard --port 3000

# Start and automatically open in browser
gt dashboard --open

The dashboard gives you a single-page overview of everything happening in your workspace: agents, convoys, hooks, queues, issues, and escalations. It auto-refreshes via htmx and includes a command palette for running gt commands directly from the browser.

Monitoring & Health

Gas Town uses a three-tier watchdog chain to keep agents healthy at scale:

Daemon (Go process) ← heartbeat every 3 min
    └── Boot (AI agent) ← intelligent triage
        └── Deacon (AI agent) ← continuous patrol
            └── Witnesses & Refineries ← per-rig agents

Witness (Per-Rig)

Each rig has a Witness that monitors its polecats. The Witness detects stuck agents, triggers recovery (nudge or handoff), manages session cleanup, and tracks completion. Witnesses delegate work rather than implementing it directly.

Deacon (Cross-Rig)

The Deacon runs continuous patrol cycles across all rigs, checking agent health, dispatching Dogs for maintenance tasks, and escalating issues that individual Witnesses can't resolve.

Escalation

When agents hit blockers, they escalate rather than waiting:

gt escalate -s HIGH "Description of blocker"
gt escalate list                    # List open escalations
gt escalate ack <bead-id>           # Acknowledge an escalation

Escalations route through Deacon -> Mayor -> Overseer based on severity. See Escalation design.

Merge Queue (Refinery)

The Refinery processes completed polecat work through a bisecting merge queue:

1. Polecat runs gt done -> branch pushed, MR bead created
2. Refinery batches pending MRs
3. Runs verification gates on the merged stack
4. If green: all MRs in batch merge to main
5. If red: bisects to isolate the failing MR, merges the good ones

This is a Bors-style merge queue — polecats never push directly to main.

Scheduler

The scheduler controls polecat dispatch capacity to prevent API rate limit exhaustion:

gt config set scheduler.max_polecats 5   # Enable deferred dispatch (max 5 concurrent)
gt scheduler status                      # Show scheduler state
gt scheduler pause                       # Pause dispatch
gt scheduler resume                      # Resume dispatch

Default mode (max_polecats = -1) dispatches immediately via gt sling. When a limit is set, the daemon dispatches incrementally, respecting capacity. See Scheduler design.

Seance

Discover and query previous agent sessions:

gt seance                              # List discoverable predecessor sessions
gt seance --talk <id>                  # Full context conversation with predecessor
gt seance --talk <id> -p "Question?"   # One-shot question to predecessor

Seance discovers sessions via .events.jsonl logs, enabling agents to recover context and decisions from earlier work without re-reading entire codebases.

Wasteland Federation

The Wasteland is a federated work coordination network linking multiple Gas Towns through DoltHub:

gt wl join hop/wl-commons              # Join a wasteland
gt wl browse                           # View wanted board
gt wl claim <id>                       # Claim a wanted item
gt wl done <id> --evidence <url>       # Submit completion with evidence
gt wl post --title "Need X"            # Post new wanted item

Completions earn portable reputation via multi-dimensional stamps (quality, speed, complexity). See Wasteland guide.

Telemetry (OpenTelemetry)

Gas Town emits all agent operations as structured logs and metrics to any OTLP-compatible backend (VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaLogs by default):

# Configure OTLP endpoints
export GT_OTEL_LOGS_URL="http://localhost:9428/insert/jsonline"
export GT_OTEL_METRICS_URL="http://localhost:8428/api/v1/write"

Events emitted: session lifecycle, agent state changes, bd calls with duration, mail operations, sling/nudge/done workflows, polecat spawn/remove, formula instantiation, convoy creation, daemon restarts, and more.

Metrics include: gastown.session.starts.total, gastown.bd.calls.total, gastown.polecat.spawns.total, gastown.done.total, gastown.convoy.creates.total, and others.

See OTEL data model and OTEL architecture for the complete event schema.

Advanced Concepts

The Propulsion Principle

Gas Town uses git hooks as a propulsion mechanism. Each hook is a git worktree with:

1. Persistent state - Work survives agent restarts
2. Version control - All changes tracked in git
3. Rollback capability - Revert to any previous state
4. Multi-agent coordination - Shared through git

Hook Lifecycle

stateDiagram-v2
    [*] --> Created: Agent spawned
    Created --> Active: Work assigned
    Active --> Suspended: Agent paused
    Suspended --> Active: Agent resumed
    Active --> Completed: Work done
    Completed --> Archived: Hook archived
    Archived --> [*]

MEOW (Mayor-Enhanced Orchestration Workflow)

MEOW is the recommended pattern:

1. Tell the Mayor - Describe what you want
2. Mayor analyzes - Breaks down into tasks
3. Convoy creation - Mayor creates convoy with beads
4. Agent spawning - Mayor spawns appropriate agents
5. Work distribution - Beads slung to agents via hooks
6. Progress monitoring - Track through convoy status
7. Completion - Mayor summarizes results

Shell Completions

# Bash
gt completion bash > /etc/bash_completion.d/gt

# Zsh
gt completion zsh > "${fpath[1]}/_gt"

# Fish
gt completion fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/gt.fish

Project Roles

Tips

• Always start with the Mayor - It's designed to be your primary interface
• Use convoys for coordination - They provide visibility across agents
• Leverage hooks for persistence - Your work won't disappear
• Create formulas for repeated tasks - Save time with Beads recipes
• Use gt feed for live monitoring - Watch agent activity and catch stuck agents early
• Monitor the dashboard - Get real-time visibility in the browser
• Let the Mayor orchestrate - It knows how to manage agents

Design Documentation

For deeper technical details, see the design docs in docs/:

Troubleshooting

Agents lose connection

Check hooks are properly initialized:

gt hooks list
gt hooks repair

Convoy stuck

Force refresh:

gt convoy refresh <convoy-id>

Mayor not responding

Restart Mayor session:

gt mayor detach
gt mayor attach

License

MIT License - see LICENSE file for details