(2026-03-04) Yegge Welcome To The Wasteland A Thousand Gas Towns

Steve Yegge: Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns. The Wasteland has been the inevitable next step for Gas Town since the day I launched it. Every new AI tooling form-factor breakthrough has involved 100x increase in token spend. How do you 100x a Gas Town? You federate a hundred Gas Town users together to build stuff.
The Wasteland is a way to link thousands of Gas Towns together in a trust network, to build stuff really, really fast. (web of trust)

At the heart of the Wasteland is a big shared Wanted Board of work. People put up ideas, and other people use their Gas Towns to help build those ideas. And you get credit for the work you do.

The Wasteland has a lot of moving parts. There are stamps. There are leaderboards. There are character sheets. The Wasteland was designed for federating work, but its metamorphosis into an RPG seems unstoppable at this point. You’ve seen the gaming interfaces people have already put on Gas Town, but with building blocks like this… it’s gonna be wild.

At its core, the Wasteland runs on accepting work and stamping it. (see BetterMeans, Metacurrency Project) When deciding whether work gets accepted, the Wasteland uses a socio-technical protocol that the industry has battle-tested for over a decade: Git’s fork/merge push/pull model.

When someone accepts a PR in the Wasteland, they stamp the contributor’s passbook. The contributor gains some reputation, and it all goes onto a permanent ledger that could eventually act something like a portable C.V./résumé. (reputation graph)

Like any RPG worth its salt, the Wasteland’s rule book is an inch thick. There’s so much to cover that we just can’t do it. So instead, I’ll handle this post in Q&A style, and try to get the main ideas across. The curious ones will figure the rest out.

It’s going to grow monstrously fast. Nom nom, eating the world of work, led by humans, not lobsters.
To keep it contained in the first couple weeks, the instructions in this post at the end are intentionally obtuse, accessible only to the most determined.

we have a growing army of awesome contributors on the Discord, led by Dane Poyzer, and big shoutouts to Krystian Gebis for pushing on multi-model support, and to Pierre-Alexandre Entraygues for our Open Telemetry. But really, there are a ton of people there helping each other out and exploring PR ideas.

In addition to our Gas Town and Beads contributors, I also want to recognize the world-class team that brought you the Wasteland today:

• Julian Knutsen, ex-CashApp/Block/Bitcoin and #1 Gas Town contributor, built the actual Wasteland implementation. All I gave him was the starting schema.
• Dr. Matt Beane, author of The Skill Code and a leading researcher on how skills are actually built and transferred, is in charge of the Wasteland’s skills and mentoring systems, and built the initial 10,000 character sheets off GitHub.
• Chris Sells, multi-author on Developer Productivity, Product Manager, and community manager who took Flutter from 100k to 3M developers, created gastownhall.ai and our highly engaged Discord community
• Brendan Hopper, distributed systems architect and strategic brain behind the Wasteland’s federation model, has supplied most of the vision and roadmap. The Wasteland is just the prelude. When you look back in a year at what we pulled off, and you wonder how the hell we did it, I will point you at Brendan.
• Tim Sehn, Founder and CEO at DoltHub, has lent his team’s support in incredibly fast turnarounds on features and bug fixes for Beads and Gas Town

Is Gas Town Ready?

Yes. Let’s just get that out of the way up front.

Dolt has completely changed the game. Tim Sehn and his team built exactly the thing we needed before we knew we needed it. Dolt is a SQL database with Git semantics. Fork it, branch it, merge it, send pull requests — on structured data. That’s what makes the whole federation trick work. And all the jank from the SQLite/JSONL backend is gone.

In short, it’s smooth sailing these days. I’ll have a lot more to say about Dolt and how amazing it is in a future post. But it feels like Dolt predicted the Wasteland, because there could not be a more perfect technology for it.

Once your agent gets you past the setup, users report that the Gas Town experience is a pleasant surprise. Everyone likes working with the Mayor. Polecats make sense, convoys make sense, slinging makes sense… and most of the rest of the town’s operation is safely behind the scenes. It all just has a good vibe to it.

Going from Claude Code to Gas Town elevates you from pair-programming into large-scale engineering leadership. It can grow with you. At first, it’s just you and the Mayor. Best buds. Later, you’ll be juggling conversations with 20-odd crew members while your Mayor is out slinging polecats at half a dozen epics at once.

If you’ve used a coding agent, then you’re ready for Gas Town.

Do I actually need Gas Town for the Wasteland?

no. All you need is Dolt, a free DoltHub credential, and a coding agent that knows the schema. With that alone, you can start submitting work in the Wasteland, getting your stamps, and moving up the leaderboards. I’ll show you at the end of the post.

(not complete highlights)