(2026-05-19) Inside The 100-Agent Software Factory

Katie Parrott: Inside the 100-agent Software Factory. Mini-Vibe Check: Gas City

A glimpse of the future that’s not (yet) ready for practical use

Earlier this year, prominent software engineer Steve Yegge published a viral Medium post about Gas Town, an open-source tool that let developers coordinate 20 to 30 AI coding agents in parallel on the same codebase. Last week, Every’s head of tech consulting, Mike Taylor, got a peek at the future of multi-agent engineering with Gas Town’s successor project, Gas City.

TL;DR: Gas City has some sharp ideas that reflect the direction software development is headed, but it’s not yet ready for prime time.

What is Gas City: Running many coding agents in parallel is table stakes for developers at this point. Getting them to do anything useful requires coordination systems to hand work to each other, review each other’s output, and not step on each other’s branches—and nobody’s quite figured out how to get that right yet. “Software factories” like Gas City are one solution: an orchestration system that hands tasks to a small team of agents, routes their work, and decides what’s done.

What works: There are three ideas from the world of software engineering that Gas City is built on and are worth internalizing, even if you never touch the toolkit.

• Dark factory versus light factory: Parts of your work where humans and agents talk to each other (planning, design, review) stay visible can be thought of as light, and parts where agents grind through clearly defined work on their own stay in the background, in the dark. As you gain trust in the agents’ output, you can move more of your process into the dark. (kinda like "above/below the API")
• One pet, many cattle: The future of multi-agent engineering is likely organized with one persistent, named supervisor you talk to directly (Gas City calls it the “mayor”), who hands tasks to anonymous, disposable workers (the “polecats”) that do one job and shut down, so they execute their job without getting lost in context or in each other’s way
• Multiple opinions on every code review: Give the same code to Claude, Codex, and Kimi at the same time for review from multiple angles.

What could be better

In Gas City, every task spins up a fresh agent session that doesn’t remember the earlier steps, so agents waste cycles re-reading context that other agents produced and miss connections a single session would have caught. Cost is also a challenge: A six-step job can cost six times the cost of one Claude session, which adds up fast

Beads, the task tracker powering the system, is built for agents first. It runs on the command line rather than as a visual dashboard, which is fine for agents but harder for humans, who want to see everything at a glance. So teams using Gas City in production typically pair it with Jira or Linear.app—placing tasks in two places instead of one. If the goal is to see could use one of the UIs made for Beads...

Additionally, Gas City was built on the assumption that AI models need hand-holding to stay on track, but models have gotten good enough that parts of Gas City built to keep models on track, such as review loops to catch mistakes and mid-task check-ins to prevent agents from drifting, are now mostly unnecessary.

Finally, Gas City uses deliberately unfamiliar words to refer to different inputs, actors, and workflows—“beads” for tasks, “polecats” for workers, “refineries” for processing steps—so it can be confusing for a team new to the tech.

If you’re already running more than 10 Claude Code sessions in parallel and reading source code, Gas City is worth a look because it’s one informed opinion on how to handle that level of orchestration

For everyone else, take the ideas and wait. OpenAI Symphony, released a few weeks ago, is a more accessible, enterprise-ready version of a similar idea: a written set of rules that turns your existing Linear board into the dashboard the agents work from. This is more in line with the way software engineers work now and doesn’t require the behavior change that Gas City does.