Steve Yegge just shipped version 1.0.0 of both Gas Town and Beads, capping off three months of chaotic development. Gas Town, his agentic workflow orchestration tool, sits at 13,000 GitHub stars. Beads, the memory and knowledge graph system that underpins it, has hit 20,000 stars in about five months, putting it in roughly the top 2,000 repos on all of GitHub.
The early days were rough. Workers would die mid-task in what Yegge calls "serial killer sprees." The Mayor component suffered repeated data loss events, earning a clown nose each time, leading to the infamous "22-nose Clown Show."
That period is over.
Gas Town has been stable for weeks and is effectively in maintenance mode. Yegge is now directing development toward its successor, Gas City, co-created with Chris Sells and Julian Knutsen, which is currently in alpha, similar to ctx.
Beads is the more interesting project. It started as a lightweight issue tracker but evolved into a general memory system for coding agents. Work items become "beads" stored in Git with full version history. Sells calls Beads the missing "Why" in your commit history. Your Git log tells you what changed, who changed it, where and how. Beads captures why.
Agents can use that context to recover from mistakes. And it's agent-agnostic. You can use it with any coding agent, not just Gas Town.
The surprising part is who's actually using these tools. Yegge describes a communications professional, four years out of school with no technical background, building a SaaS replacement her company is preparing to adopt. Academics and other non-technical knowledge workers are reportedly building production software with Gas Town.
But not everyone is sold. Hacker News users report frustrations with Beads' Git-heavy approach. Branch switching can corrupt state. Agents sometimes close tasks prematurely without proper validation. Some have already built alternatives using SQLite and added validation gates before task completion.