Broadsheet

The Contraptions Book Club 2026 is underway. The theme is the divergence machine. I introduced the idea with this diagram a couple of weeks ago, in The Modernity Machine III, in relation to the modernity machine we explored last year.

In January, we are reading Voltaire’s Candide (Theo Cuffe translation recommended) and any related essays we can get our hands on. In February, we’ll read ’s The Underground Empire. In March, you’ll get to choose between a Leibniz-Spinoza book and an Adam-Smith-David-Hume book. Beyond March, the menu is still under construction. Our focal period this year is 1600-2000, with particular emphasis on the early and middle parts.

This essay is intended to set up the dev-environment for the book club so to speak, laying out some initial frames, themes and prejudices. The setup may seem a little elaborate, but our book club isn’t just one damn book after another. It’s more a cunningly contrived contraption designed to enable systematic study of an idea-space.

We’re not picking books because they’re necessarily “good” or fun to read (though I hope most will be both), but because they help assemble a view of the world from a certain opinionated perspective (largely mine, but shaped a lot more by others this year than last year).

There’s an overarching logic and vaulting conceit to what we read, why, and how that I’ll introduce in this essay.

For those who came in late

If you’re just joining our book club shennanigans, it runs on a grand theory. In our grand theory, we are concerned with what we call world machines: contraptions that embody the logic of how the entire world works for a period of time. Our book club studies these world machines through a selection of books from, and about, the construction period of each machine.

The modernity machine that we studied in 2025 was constructed 1200-1600 and operated at a steady plateau of capability 1600-2000. It is now undergoing rapid, partially scheduled disassembly. The divergence machine was constructed 1600-2000 and has been operating in fully deployed mode for about 25 years so far.

By our grand theory, at any given time, one world machine is in operation, another is under construction, and a third may be undergoing (usually rapid) decline/dismantlement/destruction (aka rapid, partially scheduled disassembly, to adapt a term of art from rocketry). So at any given time, you have to understand the logics of two, possibly three world machines in tension to understand how the world works.

The meta-logic is derived from the Gramsci Gap and the idea of worlds being born and dying, with monsters appearing in the passages between, though the mapping is not perfect (the “world being born” is actually two worlds — a completed new world entering full production mode, and the seeds of a future world being planted).

Only two world machines are illustrated above though. The declining medieval machine that enjoyed a plateau of stable operations 1200-1600 and collapsed rapidly after, is not shown. Neither is the as-yet-unnamed machine that is is beginning to be constructed today, and destined for full deployment well past our lifetimes (whose internal logic will likely be shaped by AI crossed with End of History conditions). Juggling two world machines in our heads is hard enough I think.

In our color-by-numbers potted history template, each world machine takes about 400 years to build and turn on, operates for another 400, and declines in another 100-200 years, making for a lifespan of 900-1000 years.

Historiographic Hygiene Rules

Don’t take these numbers or underlying machinic world models too seriously. They are intended more as mnemonic devices and intuition pumps than rigorous theories of history. The point of the models is to approach our book selection and reading with a particular sensibility, paying attention to particular themes and questions (in brief: those that center machinic phenomenology over either organic/“natural” or humanistic).

Historical time, of course, can and does dilate or contract according to both the raw pace of historical events, and the ontological status of “history” as such, and whether or not one can meaningfully posit the existence of a gestalt world process even deserving of the name. The Paleolithic world machine probably had a lifespan of 100,000+ years. The Neolithic world machine had a lifespan of at least 15,000 years. The Bronze Age world machine probably lasted about 4000 years. Over the really longue duree, world-machine lifespans appear to be falling.

But even more importantly, world machine temporalities appear to be — complicating. Later historical machines feature more complex multi-temporalities, suffused with more kinds of atemporalities in their interstices, than earlier ones. To quote the tenth Doctor Who, they are bigger balls of “wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff.” The temporal vorticity of history increases with chronological time, and is systematically higher with each new world machine. This is one reason the future always looks more chaotic from perspectives rooted in the past.

Beyond helping book-keep cause and effect, and correlate human events with natural ones, raw chronological time is not as useful for studying history as you might think. Periodizing into “world machine” epochs, while it might seem like a caricaturing move, is surprisingly helpful in organizing our understandings.

This is why there is no problem with continuing to study history after the end of history. Fukuyama’s End of History argument, a staple of my thinking and this book club, rests on a particular ontological of history (his intellectual ancestor, Alexander Kojeve, is on the shortlist for our book club). It is possible to study history in “end of history” conditions, making use of Fukuyama’s models, without being exclusively committed to his ontology of history.

Thanks to the acceleration of history and the shortening of world-machine lifespans, the unnamed AI-powered world machine now being seeded might very well have a lifespan of only 300 years total perhaps, rather than 900-1000, and cut short the reign of the divergence machine now entering production. Given that it accelerates the rerun-heavy nature of post-End-of-History temporalities, those 300 years might feel a great deal more atemporal. And a lot more wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey too.

Keep these hygiene notes in mind as you read.

Divergence in Plan View

The first graph with its intersecting S-curve portrait might tempt you into a too-reductive view of the succession of world machines as some sort of “disruption” process. Resist the temptation. World machines embody richer phenomenology.

Here is another view of both machines, this time in historical plan view. Treat this as your main conceptual map for the book club this year.

On the y-axis, instead of machine complexity portrayed as a classic pair of S-curves, with one displacing the other, we see the fundamental dynamic of each machine, measured by span of non-canoncity.

The modernity machine manufactures and projects convergent canonicity across the planet. You can think of this as a kind of homogenizing, legibilizing fiat reality imposed from a few sources of centralized power (James Scott Seeing Like a State is not on the menu for the book club, but would be a useful prerequisite read if you haven’t already read it — most people I am expecting will join the book club have either read it or good summaries of it).

Those who don’t participate in the exercise of that centralized power are defined by their responses to it. But this doesn’t make those responses “divergent.”

Principle: In general, responses to convergent canonicity tend to become part of that convergent canonicity.

Ie, responses to the modernity machine should be considered part of that machine, because they’re attentionally and informationally entangled with it.

In the path-dependent history that played out on this planet, convergent canonicity can be allegorically represented as a braid of strands winding around a European history centerline.

Excursions away from that centerline, particularly those that stray beyond a recognizably European band, or even play out entirely outside it, are a measure of non-canonicity. These excursions are anomalous from the perspective of the modernity machine; its bugspace so to speak. But non-canonicity, the bugspace of the modernity machine, is the feature space of the divergence machine.

The divergence machine manufactures, or rather, spawns variety. Specifically, variety in a state of expansion and mutual retreat, something like the cosmological red shift playing out in civilizational configuration space.

The divergence machine doesn’t contest political space organized by the modernity machine, based on principles of canonicity. In fact it rests on and relies on, what the modernity machine has already done, without attempting to either perpetuate it or destroy it.

Principle: The divergence machine is not an anti-modernity machine, or in any other particular systematic relationship to it; it has its own internal logic not derived from that of the modernity machine. It assumes the persistence of some of the major historical effects of the modernity machine, but not the perpetuation of the machine itself.

Specifically, the divergence machine doesn’t try to subvert the modernity machine critically (the way “postmodernity” did). Rather, it renders canonicity irrelevant, by creating and organizing civilizational space that is past the reach of the logic of the modernity machine entirely.

In divergence-machine regimes (which, remember, are only 25 years old in their complete form, even if they have been 400 years in the making) the space previously organized by convergent canonicity (the “center” so to speak) or responses to it (which orient towards that “center”), gets phenomenologically bracketed. This is not an intellectual move but a natural and emergent side-effect of divergent historical processes. It is not some sort of partially-self-conscious decentering theorized and narrated by a tribe of intellectuals on a mission.

I’m still working out the nuances of my account of the world after modernity, and how it resembles or differs from accounts that rejoice under names like postmodernity, late modernity, and metamodernity, but it is important to have rough-and-ready understandings of these idea-spaces as we read, because a lot of what we will read will have elements of all these world processes and associated intellectual currents.

So it will be useful to ask questions like is this book late modern, postmodern, metamodern, or divergentist?

Here’s my current cheat sheet. Some of this may change/evolve.

Late Modernity

Late modernity is localized, slowly unraveling, zombie persistence of the modernity machine, including both natural persistence, and conscious political projects to perpetuate it while that’s still an option, or restore it to a pristine state once it is clearly entering a state of dereliction.

There is not much more to be said about late modernity (the associated intellectual currents are fairly weak — Zygmunt Bauman and a few others come to mind), but there is a lot to see of it. Almost everything you see around you is late modern. Almost everything in the news headlines is late modern. We won’t see the last of late modernity in our lifetimes.

Arguably, the bulk of the energy of the world will continue to flow through late-modern pathways for at least our lifetimes, even if very little of the evolutionary intelligence of the world flows through those pathways (hence “zombie” or perhaps “energetic zombie” would be a better term, like the ones in the Korean movie, Train to Busan).

China as it is being imagined and conjured by the CCP today, if not its people, is primarily a late modern world process. But China, the larger, more nebulous civilizational unit and world sub-process, is a more complex beast, not reducible to late-modern dynamics and phenomenology being supervised by the CCP.

Late modernity is not a focus for us, but I liked Adam Curtis’ fevered account of it as “hypernormalcy” in his 2016 documentary. All the energy of the Trumpist planetary turn, right up to the Maduro kidnapping/rendition this weekend, is late-modernity in action. Trumpism and related reactionary turns worldwide are obviously late modern, at least doctrinally, even if they are tactically more open (including borrowing from postmodernity and meta-modernity, which we discus next) in their attempts to shape the fate of the world.

We will not read much about late modernity, or make much use of late-modern perspectives (our readings from last year, suitably extrapolated, should be sufficient to make late modern dynamics sufficiently intelligible for our purposes), but we’ll keep our eyes open for late-modern dynamics.

Our go-to move as we read will be to try and artificially eclipse out the bright dying star of modernity that is late modernism, so we can look at more interesting things. To the extent our book club takes note of headline-grade current events, we will make use of late-modern perspectives to make sense of them, but look for divergence-machine metabolic processes that also respond to them in more long-term consequential ways.

Postmodernity

Postmodernity is both a class of world processes that fall short of defining a world-machine proper (certain strains of post-colonial nationalism for instance), and an attempt to theorize and construct the world entirely in terms of adversarial responses to modernity. As such, postmodernity encompasses both natural modes of alterity (a postmodern term of art) and intellectual-political projects that attempt to make those modes legible and rugged, while simultaneously making the dynamics of the modernity machine fragile and vulnerable to attack.

For our book club, we will use “postmodern” in the broad, loose sense used in popular discourse, covering everything from the original french theorists to more recent American Marxist flavors. We will also use the term for historical processes (such as say independence movements, language/culture revitalization movements, various feminisms and late-stage manifestations in the environmental and social justice movements) that are usefully described by postmodern intellectual perspectives primarily because they constitute themselves with reference to those perspectives. It is worth noting that postmodern intellectual perspectives have been much more constitutive of world-processes in the last century than late modern ones, which have largely emerged as post-hoc narratives of decline processes already underway.

Postmodernity features proportions of energy and intelligence that are the opposite of those exhibited by late modernity. It is an intelligent ghost rather than an energetic zombie. It organizes very little of the energy of world processes today (though it lays claim to a great deal through energetic labeling and map-making), but the intellectual currents associated with it are still extraordinarily strong, decades past their peak. To the point that if you presume to think about world processes at all without using their preferred terms of reference (or worse, using and abusing them partially where useful), they will send representatives to knock on your door in the dead of the night and lecture you.

Unlike divergence, postmodernity does contest the civilizational space organized by modernity (it can conceive of no other), and is therefore in a zero/negative-sum relationship to late modernity. Postmodernity tries to override the logics that late modernity tries to perpetuate.

Principle: The postmodern project, I believe, is essentially complete and has been largely successful as an analytical and political project.

There is much to be learned by studying its discoveries and history. But there’s not much point to continuing the postmodern project, either through constituting world processes by its logic, or keeping the associated intellectual currents going. They’ve made all the discoveries they are going to. The paradigm is exhausted.

Equally, to the extent there are things to dislike about postmodernity, there is no point fighting it, as late modernity likes to do, because on most consequential matters where postmodernity pursued clear objectives, it has already won in ways that cannot really be undone or reversed.

One entailment of this position: the still-ongoing battle between reactionary politics and wokism is something like a cage match between an energetic zombie and an intelligent ghost in the mental model we’ll be adopting for the book club.

To the extent the concerns of either side remain live and consequential ones, we will look elsewhere for meaningful phenomenology to think about. Our assumption will be: If the divergence machine “solves” for social justice or environmental stewardship for example, we should not expect the mechanics to look anything like the ones postmodernity as a constitutive force briefly powered. Equally, if the divergence machine “solves” for some recognizable continuation of things like ethnic or racial identity and nation-state-based culture and traditions, it will look nothing like the solutions of the modernity machine in its late-modern perpetuations and life-extensions.

Our go-to move will be to treat the current war between Late Modernism and Postmodernism as noise to be filtered out as we attempt to decipher the workings of the divergence machine. We might retain problems posed by those perspectives, but likely not any proposed solutions. We will treat both as spent perspectives, as far as their creative constitutive capacities go.

Our attitude towards the intellectual legacy of postmodernity (in the narrow sense of a set of twentieth-century intellectual currents) will be cannibalistic: An occasionally useful source of frames and terms, and a historically consequential set of world processes through part of the twentieth century. Think raw material, not authority or influence. Ghosts can’t defend their corpses after all, or they wouldn’t be ghosts.

Metamodernity

Metamodernity could perhaps be clubbed with Late Modernity, but it is useful to keep it distinct.

I define it as attempts to resurrect patterns of modernity in piecemeal forms that might be viable for contemporary circumstances. (A friend of mine, Rob Knight, evocatively called it “modernism in drag”).

This project, I believe, is ill-conceived, unnecessary, and doomed. I react poorly to things with “meta” in their name and I intend to impose this prejudice on the book club and its activities :)

Perhaps the most important element of metamodernity is world processes and intellectual currents that can be understood as responses to unrecoverable localized psyche failures of modernity. Metamodernity is what you dream up when modernity fails completely enough that there is nothing to revivify or perpetuate, but you still want what it used to deliver reliably, especially inside your head. You go meta when it is too late to be merely late.

Continuing our monstrous taxonomy, if late modernism is an energetic zombie, and postmodernity is an intelligent ghost, metamodernity is ennervated necromancy.

The metamodern project is not reactionary (for a long time, I was convinced it was, but I’ve changed my mind). Metamodernists are typically neither deluded enough, nor chauvinistic enough, nor have enough raw material to work with, to be reactionary about the things they care about.

The so-called “meaning crisis” and ideas like “re-enchantment” could be classified as metamodern turns in intellectual currents. Sincerity, authenticity, and irony are particular concerns of metamodernity, but unlike late modernity, metamodernity does not treat irony as the evil manufacture of postmodernity, constituting a casus belli for culture warring. Rather, in metamodern accounts, irony appears as an emergent consequence of historical processes, resulting in a set of problems to be solved, rather than a set of crimes to be prosecuted.

So metamodern responses take the form of rather doleful adaptation and sentimental creativity, rather than culture warring. The so-called “trad turn” strikes me as more metamodern than neoreactionary (but I’m not attached to this reading). Philosophers in the neo-Heideggerian tradition like Byung-Chul Han strike me as pursuing metamodern projects.

So far, metamodernity exists only as a few weak intellectual currents and perhaps a few attempts at post-ironic art, especially in screen media. There are no meaningful world processes I would classify as metamodern. There are no high-energy phenomena like ethnonationalist political movements, or DEI-ESG wokeism, that we can associate with metamodernism. So far, metamodernists seem to have contented themselves with writing and making art with rather gloomy, tortured gravitas.

There is however, a negative space we can attach to metamodernity that helps define it — the class of ennervation phenomena generally referred to as involution. This spans hikkikomori, “laying flat,” “quiet quitting” and so on. Territories defined by the failure to meaningfully address what only the maps of metamodernity even attempt to organize and attend to.

Our go-to move in relation to metamodernism will be to pay attention to the negative spaces it points to, without doing anything about them.

Rewinding 400 Years

I’ve written elsewhere about my philosophy of Divergentism, which has informed, but only partially determined what I’m calling the divergence machine and the agenda of the 2026 book club.

Our go-to move in relation to divergence is to assume everything important about it started as much as 400 years ago.

If something we read looks like it belongs in an account of the divergence machine, we will try the following moves:

Check if it can be traced back to seeds planted ~1600 or thereabouts
Test to see if it’s better understood as an zombie late-modern thing
Test to see if it’s better understood as an intelligent ghost of postmodernity
Test to see if it’s better understood as ongoing metamodern ennervated necromancy

Phenomenology that gets past this four-stage filter of negative definition can then be explored with “divergence” questions and probes, such as:

Is there plurality in the mechanics of whatever is happening?
Does it involve people understanding each other less, but getting along better?
Does it smell like Darwinian evolution?
Does it relativize or bracket things that seem canonical?
Is there generative variety emerging from it?
Are there elements of absurdity or humor to it?
And perhaps most importantly, is it alive?

Our goal will be to look for, analyze, and place machinic constructions on, things that have the energy intensity of late modernity without significant convergent canonicity in associated intelligence processes; the irony, obliquity, and indirection of postmodernity without its negative-sum attention-entanglements with late modernity; and finally the expansive and reality-based concerns of meta-modernity without its interiority or fundamentally gloomy suffering-and-healing sensibilities.

Above all, our true-north question will be does this embody new forms of liveness being newly and generatively turned on in the world?

Our exploration of the divergence machine is a search for emerging liveness, so to speak.

Let’s have at it. Post your thoughts on Candide in this chat thread.

It has been three days since I launched Gas Town! 🔥⛽💥🛢️🔥 Woohoo!

The launch post had a lot of ground to cover. Fortunately we can relax now. Gas Town is alive, if only just. I have created something that is just barely smart enough. Gas Town works pretty OK today. Super fast, very fun, very powerful, definitely sloppy. But it will get dramatically more capable as four evolving situations unfold this year, around tooling and model intelligence.

In this post, I’ll share a bit of the backstory of Gas Town that I had to leave out of the Jan 1 post. And then I’ll share some predictions about what I think will happen to IDEs, big companies, and coding agents themselves. I also plan to do a bunch of posts and videos on how I use Gas Town to do real work.

Gas Town is impressive to watch in action. And it’s only just getting started.

Figure: Gas Town classroom with protesters outside

Gas Town’s Free Upgrades

First, let’s talk about how Gas Town will get smarter, simply from having launched it. Gas Town is a bit of a Swamp Thing right now; it sort of oozes rather than whirs. It does work, and astonishingly fast. Nothing like hurling swarms of Claude Code Opus 4.5 instances at a big epic, or bug backlog. Chomp, chomp! But it also requires a lot of manual steering and course-correction, and you sometimes have to push it to finish.

But that initial instability will fade over the course of 2026. Gas Town will go from a self-propelling slime monster to a shiny, well-run agent factory. All without me having to do a damned thing to improve it myself anymore (though I still will!)

First, models will get smarter. I know many of you think they have plateaued. I know many of you are building tools around the idea, “what if the models never got any smarter?” But models are getting smarter, and better at coding (and everything else). I aimed high with Gas Town. It’s a lot today, but it should be natural for models to play their roles by midyear, if not sooner.

Second, Gas Town and Beads are going to finally make it into the training corpus. One of the astonishing hallmarks of Beads is that agents use it naturally and smoothly with no training. Gas Town, too — still a bit bumpy yet, since Beads is two months more mature. But Gas Town will get there too. Fast.

I have been curating Gas Town the same way I did Beads, using the Desire Paths approach to agent UX. You tell the agent what you want, watch closely what they try, and then implement the thing they tried. Make it real. Over and over. Until your tools works just the way agents believe it should work. So Gas Town is gradually becoming agent-friendly, even without being in the training corpus.

But now that people are using it? Psh. Agents will know all about Gas Town by summer.

Third, coding agent shops are going to wake up, realize that they have built workers when I’ve built a factory (and the world will soon build more factories), and 2026 agents will compete on how well they support being factory workers. Gas Town currently has a crummy, duct-taped API atop a agents that offer barely any platform hooks. The agent shops that start supporting all the necessary automation hooks, to start turning their beloved pets into cattle, will be the agents who win in 2026.

Fourth, and last but not least, the Gas Town community is already going nuts. I’ve already had over 50 PRs, and double that in issue reports and feature requests. And it’s only the weekend; most people haven’t even come back from the holidays and seen Gas Town yet. Despite my dire warnings not to use it, Gas Town is growing fast, 10x faster than Beads did. Even if the models weren’t getting smarter, Gas Town will still come into its own anyway, with the community’s help.

Those of you who understood the vision immediately and reached out — I am grateful for you. And for all the contributors sending PRs and GHIs and trying it out, I’m so glad for your help.

Gas Town’s contributors will help make this a reality. I’ve painted just enough of a complete and coherent vision, with a solid initial implementation, that people are already on board and helping me fill in the details.

OK, a little story of how we got here, and then we’ll get to the predictions. Feel free to skip or skim the backstory if you’re not interested.

Gas Town was Orchestrator #4

In August I started working on an orchestrator called vibecoder. It was in TypeScript, all vibe coded. It was a serious attempt to automate my own workflow using (at the time) Amp, which has always been a luxury Rolls-Royce coding agent. Amp has great ergonomics. But importantly, it also has Ads — which means, Amp just might be the most affordable way to use Gas Town today. I found myself running 5–10 instances of Amp, and wanted to try to figure out how to get them to help me with the job.

My v1 attempt, Vibecoder, was built atop Temporal, which is the gold standard for workflow orchestration. It proved cumbersome for my needs. The workflows I was orchestrating turned out to be micro-workflows, since you have to severely decompose tasks for LLMs to reliably follow them.

Unfortunately, that lost me some scalability: Gas Town isn’t super vertically scalable in its K8s-shaped form. A town is about machine-sized. Gas Town scales by having lots of towns, much like Git scales by having lots of repos, which really just pushes the scaling problem onto the user. For this reason, I still believe Temporal will be a key piece of the puzzle for scaling AI workflows to enterprise level. Models love to offload cognition to powerful tools, and Temporal is as powerful as it gets: the Bagger 288 of workflow orchestrators. But that power is exactly why I stepped away from it for my dev tool: I feel like it needs a “lite” version.

My v2 version of vibecoder was called vc. You can see the legacy repo; it was supposed to be private but at some point I think vc itself made the repo public. It was in Go. It wound up being overly monolithic, not because of Go, but because I was trying to solve the wrong problem. With vibecoder and vc, I was trying to make agents better. With Gas Town, I was just trying to make more of them. The fact that Gas Town has all the features of the other two, with a tiny fraction of the code, tells me I finally got it right.

My v3 orchestrator began on November 23rd. I had by then left Sourcegraph (three memorable years, great company, lots of fun) and I was now working on a set of Python scripts aimed at trying to help me with swarming work. I had given up on quality and switched my focus to quantity. I started by moving all my ad-hoc named agents (just random directories and repo clones) under a single tree and trying to organize them with git worktree. I called it Gas Town, after Mad Max, because it was a ridiculously chaotic environment at first, where it felt like everyone was fighting to get their work done. I now call that first version PGT, or Python Gas Town.

Gas Town eagerly adopted a discovery by Jeffrey Emanuel, author of MCP Agent Mail. He found that combining Mail with Beads led to an ad-hoc “agent village,” where agents will naturally collaborate divide up work and farm it out. Coding agents are pros at email-like interfaces, and you can use mail as an “agent village” messaging system without needing to train or prompt them. They just get it. Gas Town was my attempt to turn an ad-hoc agent village into a coordinated agent town.

Python Gas Town grew quickly, becoming operational within a week, and carrying me for a couple weeks. It had evolved most of the roles except Deacon and Dogs. The Refinery was brand-new and untested. Mostly what Python Gas Town did was provide spawning for named and ephemeral workers. All with raw Beads and epics. But something about it felt right.

The last 2 weeks of December, after my trip to Sydney/Melbourne to visit CBA, was the fertile innovation period where I came up with 90% of the design for Gas Town. I had promised everyone at the workshops that I was going to launch it (Python Gas Town!) by Christmas day, or Jan 1 at the latest. Not realizing that I was going to wind up redesigning and rewriting the whole thing in Go, immediately after I got home.

It was the port to Go that actually encouraged me to try different things. I would tell Claude, “this is it, this is our last chance to get this or that irksome issue fixed”, and I went all-in on Gas Town’s revised architecture. I had to redo it all 3 or 4 times (again, after 3–4 redesigns in PGT) because the agents were still guessing wrong about the directory structure and roles. But eventually I achieved liftoff. By Dec 29th, my handoff loops were working, seances worked, polecats and swarms and convoys were working, the crew and tmux bindings were working, and I could improve Gas Town simply by slinging work at it. It was time to launch!

Why Golang?

My four orchestrators were written in TypeScript, Go, Python, then Go. For the record, I’m mostly a Java/Kotlin guy by background, and my best scripting language is probably Ruby. And I am generally happiest hand-coding in any dialect of Lisp.

But I am really liking Go for vibe-coded projects. I probably wrote close to a million lines of code last year, rivaling my entire 40-year career oeuvre to date. I started writing code at age 17, and I estimate that in the past 40 years I’ve handwritten about 1.1 million lines of released production code. But despite my attempts to keep Beads and Gas Town small, together they are already pushing half a million lines of code. With contributor contributions

During the time I was vibe-coding those million lines of code, I learned a lot about what AIs handle well and poorly. And what I found is that models waste a lot of tokens on TypeScript. It’s, like, too much language for them. Easily a third to half of all my diffs they created in TS were either complicated type manipulations, or complicated workarounds to avoid having to put proper types on things. Every single “write code” step had to be followed by 2–3 “let’s make it less bad” steps that don’t exist in other languages, to force it to go clean up all its crummy type modeling. I found it to be a huge waste of tokens, and the end result was still always a huge pile of code. For an ultra-expressive language it sure is verbose!

Python was “fine”. It didn’t suck. It hot reloaded my changes as I was working, which was nice. Whereas with Go, every agent has to reinstall and re-codesign the binary locally whenever you make a change, and they tend to forget. PGT’s code diffs were easy to scan and understand. The agents don’t waste time wrestling with type modeling. I think for server-side stuff, Python can potentially be great. But for a client-side deployment, it still always felt like a bunch of scripts. I liked Beads’ ability to build and distribute a native Go binary, so I opted for that with Go Gas Town.

Sure enough, I found on my second major Go project that Go is just… good. Polyglots have always turned their noses down a bit at Go because it’s “boring,” but I now think that’s an evolutionary advantage in the AI-coding space. When the diffs go by in TypeScript, half the time you’re like, what awful thing is my computer up to now? But with Go, it’s just boring. It’s writing log files, doing simple loops, doing simple conditionals, reading from maps and arrays, just super duper plain vanilla stuff. Which means you can always understand it! Speaking as someone who has studied and used 50+ programming languages, always looking for elegance and compactness — to my surprise, Go is a real boon to vibe-coding systems programmers.

Is TypeScript still the best for Web apps? Yeah, probably. I’m just glad I don’t have to build one.

The Future of Coding Agents

I’ve already predicted that IDEs, in their current form, are goners. If you’re still using one, you need to get your ass in gear and start using coding agents before before you acquire the equivalent of severe body odor on the open market.

Everyone seems to think that the future of coding agents is… coding agents. I’ll reiterate what my friend Brendan Hopper said about them, which is that when work needs to be done, nature prefers colonies. Nature builds ant colonies, Brendan says, while Claude Code is “the world’s biggest fuckin’ ant.” It will bite you in half and take all your resources. Everyone is focused on making their ant run longer, perform more, and do bigger things. Making the super-worker. The super-ant. It’s like all the black and white 1950s horror movies I watched as a kid in the 1970s.

And it’s great, because a colony of huge ants is going to really kick ass. Nothing wrong with big ants, yeah? I don’t mind at all that coding agents are getting better. I appreciate it, and in fact, I count on it. Gas Town really needs another model upgrade or two before it’s firing on all cylinders. I saw it appreciably improve when Opus 4.5 came out. I already had Python Gas Town and it was a struggle, but Opus 4.5 made it super smooth, overnight. So I know it’s just gonna keep getting smoother as the ants get bigger.

But colonies are going to win. Factories are going to win. Automation is going to win. Of course they’re gonna fucking win. Anyone who thinks otherwise is, well, not a big fan of history, I guess.

So my prediction here is that coding agents are very soon going to shift focus to be better colony workers. They need to have direct, built-in support for the emerging “Orchestrator API Surface”, which is a score or more or interaction points where I had to create some shitty hack because the agents have almost no platform APIs. Why? Because none of the 30+ coding-agent vendors are thinking of their precious baby coding agent as a colony worker. They’re thinking of it as a human pair programmer. Gas Town is going to change that over the course of 2026. The focus will shift to coordinating agents.

I’m not saying we’re going to give up on curating the human/agent loop — we need to continue improving that. But the real progress comes from colonies. The agents who get that, and embrace it, will win.

The Future of Big Companies

I think big companies are going to be screwed. Really screwed. The form factor is starting to be wrong. It’s too many people to accomplish too little work. Have you noticed how every fuckin’ person on LinkedIn is a CEO or cofounder now? The entire world is going to explode into tiny companies, which will then aggregate and re-form into larger ones… but not until we go through at least a year of churn, where small shops dramatically outperform large ones, to a degree we’ve never seen in all history.

Figure: Small shops compete directly with bigger ones

Here’s a case study for you. I had lunch the other day with a couple ex-Amazon buddies, neither of whom I’d seen in 20 years — Ryan Snodgrass and Ajit Banerjee, who are doing a startup together in the devops/automation space. They are big Beads fans and wanted to grab lunch and chat about it. We ate at Cactus in Kirkland, always good food there. And we had a hell of a chat! Thanks for the lunch, guys!

These guys are level 8s on my developer-evolution chart from the Gas Town launch post. They’re pushing coding agents as hard as anyone on the planet. And they’re observing some phenomena that I didn’t see coming. This is because they are doing something that I am not: they are working as a team, whereas all my orchestrated vibe coding has been done alone.

The stories they told me… it’s all still buzzing around in my head. They are both vibe coding with agents (Claude Code and maybe a couple others), and they both lean hard into Beads, which is a workflow accelerator. It doesn’t actually matter what your agentic coding workflow is: Beads will accelerate it. They both have unlimited tokens; Ryan’s burning $60k/year or thereabouts, but is quickly pushing up into dev-salary territory. So they have been achieving the maximum speeds you can get with coding agents.

Their stories flew by, but the theme was the same: They are going so fast that other teammates can’t keep up. They have a contributor in Munich who works in PST (our timezone), and he’ll say, “I did X!” And they’ll get mad and say, “Why did you do X, where did you get that information from?” And he’ll be like, it was from 2 hours ago. And they’ll say, “2 hours ago!? That’s ancient!” It might as well have been 2 weeks ago.

Ajit and Ryan go so fast that they have these new rules emerging, like, everything you do has to be 100% transparent and announced, all the time, or else you might as well be working in a sealed concrete chamber a mile underground. Everyone has to see your work or nobody will see it. Stuff is moving by too fast.

How do you scale this up to a big company? Crikey, when Ajit & Ryan get fully spun up with Gas Town, they’re going to be at many multiples of today’s productivity. They don’t need to scale it to a big company. Heck, they can’t scale it to a big company. At least, nobody knows how today.

Gene Kim and I are seeing this everywhere; we talked to one big company who was getting so wrecked by the merge problem that they decided the solution was “one engineer per repo”(!) They basically gave up and punted on coordination, ceding the floor to raw single-dev velocity.

This is crazy, right? And factory coding farms like Gas Town will only accelerate and accentuate this problem. Solo unicorn? They’ll all be solo, soon. At this rate I’ll be more impressed if a 100-person startup can make a billion dollars in 2027. Genuinely impressed. How will they even communicate, with that many people doing AI work at once? I can’t wait to find out.

I’m sure we’ll solve all these problems eventually, but as of this moment, we’re at the beginning of a massive shift that’s going to plow through the industry like a tornado, flipping companies like houses.

OK, we’ve done the backstory, we’ve done the predictions. Let’s land the plane.

Like and Subscribe and F*** Off

Ha! Just kidding, I already told you all to f*** off in the launch post, several times, so if you’re still here, you’re definitely one of the crazy ones and welcome aboard!

Plus, I don’t even think Medium has that like/subscribe stuff. Do they?

I’ve got a LOT of Gas Town content coming. Gas Town is the Big One. I’ll do videos that show you how I work with Gas Town, doing real work with it. I’ll post tips and tricks. I’ll share stuff that other people are doing with Gas Town. I’ll showcase agents that are working to become compatible Gas Town colony workers. And Gene Kim and I will continue to host hands-on workshops throughout 2026, for those of you who want a premium educational experience to jumpstart your enterprise devs in this brave new world.

Remember, you’re probably not ready for Gas Town just yet. I’ll reprise the “Evolution of Coders, 2024–2026,” from the launch post, as it’s already making the rounds and sparking a lot of discussion.

Figure 2: Evolution of the Programmer, 2024–2026

The post shows a spectrum of 8 levels of developer, with trust in the agent gradually increasing from zero to where it takes over your IDE, spills into the CLI, and then multiplies from there.

You need to be at least level 6, and have about half of the XP needed to reach level 7, before you’ll appreciate Gas Town. If you are already very experienced with multi-agent agentic coding, outside the IDE, then I think you will immediately find Gas Town a breath of fresh air. You’ll be faster than ever, with the exact same quality output you’ve learned to demand and expect with “naked” Claude Code, or with ad-hoc orchestrators.

Level 7+ users are already reporting that Gas Town is fun. Which it is! Once it gets on a roll for you, and it starts plowing through giant piles of heavily-reviewed, heavily-tested work, day after day, you’ll realize, wow. This is it. There’s no going back. We’ve arrived at factory farming code. And it’s hella fun.

I’m ready to write my next two posts about Gas Town, so let’s wrap this one! I’ll throw in some original content here to get you to subscribe. AI did not write this. Trying to get AI to write stuff like this is like getting old people to clap their hands to music.

Your original content: the beginnings of a song about Gas Town.

(To the tune of, well… you know.)

LeFou: Gosh it disturbs me to see you, Gas Town, looking so hard at my job
Every one here’d love to use you, Gas Town, you’re making our coder hearts throb
There’s no orchestration available today
We’re wrestling with Claude Code all night
Gas Town you’ve shown us the game’s pay to play
Oh we hope it will turn out all right…

Nooooo…
Ooooone…
Churns like Gas Town
Token-burns like Gas Town
No one’s cloud bill at end-of-month hurts like Gas Town!
For there’s no system half as autonomous
It’s got Beads, so it keeps going on
You can ask any coder who’s tried us
And they will all tell you their savings are gone!

No one codes like Gas Town
Context-loads like Gas Town
No one leaves humans out in the cold like Gas Town!
(spoken) “I’m especially skillful at orchestrating!”
My, what a rig, that Gas Town!

FAQ

People have been asking some interesting questions about Gas Town already.

Q: Are we entering a pay-to-play era where garage hackers are irrelevant?

A: It’s an understandable question. Gas Town is the beginning of industrialized factory-farming of code, which feels like pay to play. It’s expensive today, and as the models improve, it will become even more expensive to push it at the frontier. However, I think garage vibe-coding is going to be alive and well starting around summer 2026. OSS models lag frontier models by about 7 months, so by summer, OSS models will be as good as October’s crop, which were “good enough” for most startup-type eng work. If you have a GPU or two, you can run them for free all night long.

Q: Does Gas Town obsolete Vibe Coding?

A: Ha! It does not. Gas Town goes the other way, and fully embraces vibe coding. People still don’t understand that we’ve been vibe coding since the Stone Age. Programming has always been a best-effort, we’ll-fix-shit-later endeavor. We always ship with bugs. The question is, how close is it? How good are your tests? How good is your verification suite? Does it meet the customer’s needs? That’s all that matters. Today is no different from how engineering has ever been. From a company’s perspective, historically, the engineer has always been the black box. You ask them for stuff; it eventually arrives, broken, and then gradually you work together to fix it. Now the AI is that black box. If you want to learn the art of Vibe Coding so you can be maximally effect with coding agents and Gas Town, check out the Vibe Coding book that I co-wrote with the legendary Gene Kim!

The charges range from possession of child pornography to sexual assault, child molestation and aggravated kidnapping.

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