Tyler Longwell

On New Year's Day 2026, while many were recovering from the night before, a different kind of hangover took hold of every AI-pilled, chronically online software engineer. Steve Yegge published a new blog post: "Welcome to Gas Town." Some walked away inspired to finally use their agents optimally; others were just plain confused. If you're like me, you felt a bit of both.

Yegge's 34 minute post is a sprawling vision filled with futuristic ideas, playful characters, and enough side tangents to make your head spin. But underneath the lore is a massive architectural shift. I want to take a step back and simplify the "Big Idea" for everyone: Gas Town is a philosophy and a proof of concept to help people coordinate multiple agents working together.

As AI agents grow in capability, more people feel empowered to code and contribute to open source. The ceiling feels higher than ever. That is a net positive for the ecosystem, but it also changes the day-to-day reality for maintainers. Maintainers like the goose team face a growing volume of pull requests and issues, often faster than they can realistically process.

We embraced this reality and put goose to work on its own backlog.