Running Gas Town on Easy Mode

Probably like a few others I've been looking at Steve Yegge's Gas Town with some trepidation. For the last 18 months I've been using coding agents like a fast bike - 1:1 with a tight steering loop or end up in a ditch. Gas Town not only lets multiple agents rip but comes with a baroque middle management structure made of forest animals and requires tmux (which tbh I had to look up but sounds like being told to 'just learn emacs', to which I have always replied 'you can't make me'). But on the other hand Steve says it's the shiz and he knows tech better than you or I, and he saw javascript's land and expand longevity way before just about anyone. Hmm...

Now I have a hugely ambitious project I've been working on during the Christmas period which span (spun, spinned?) out of my AI governance platform Centralised.AI. You should definitely check that out if you are in the governance space. (What is this hugely ambitious project? A Google Slides killer, more on that to come.) But that means I need to do a lot of work, very fast just to keep up. Last week I had a great experience fanning out 14 Claude Code agents to build a huge 180 function library in about an hour. My Slides killer has a lot more code which might actually benefit from some parallel grinding and this planted the seed that just maybe some of it could be a match for Gas Town.

Now I'm never going to learn tmux as my brain is a small island more overpopulated than Macau, so last weekend on a whim I asked Claude Code if it could install Gas Town for me. And it just worked... but then the real test - can it run Gas Town for me. I really hadn't expected it to work but it was kind of flawless and slick. Somehow I had lucked out, escaping all the fiddly tech stuff, and could just bark instructions at poor Claude from a comfy back seat. Make a plan and give it to the mayor, stop micromanaging and just let the mayor handle it, create a new crew member, what is that polecat doing etc. Within minutes I was ensconced as lord of the fucking manor oh yeah.

Of course the dream we all share, beyond world peace and being better looking, is doing our work while we sleep and go shopping. For a brief moment I was ‘on the way’. But... I'd have 20 minutes of intense activity while I watched my claude account meter move to the right in real time 😱 …and then my crew would just grind to a halt, the mayor was snoozing, the deacon was dead, and the dogs were defective. I found myself in a reinvention of middle management management, checking on the watchers, sending the mayor messages to read his messages, pinging polecats. This all got really repetitive and took me a couple of days to figure out there was a local path problem on my install which had cascaded (of course).

So while I was figuring all that out I had given it a parallel test project, which was to build me a browser UI for all these things I was asking Claude Code to do to fix my Gas Town woes. And a couple of intense days later that finally brings me to what this is all actually about - https://smorgasbord.pm (geddit?)

What we have here is a tool that can do a lot of Gas Town for you. It dumbs it down a fair bit - enough for me as a total Gas Town noob to have some idea about what is going on in any case - but maybe that's the value right there 😄

I didn’t yet do a full Smorgasbord theme but it ships with envs.now inspired theme as default and a minimal corporate theme called Hangover for when you want either low distraction or gravitas cosplay.

What it does (today):

• Command Centre - one screen view of workers, mail, refineries, and system status. (I think you could possibly do a project just from here if everything is running smoothly in your setup.)

• Work - a drill-down view of your deliverables plus kanban board for tasks and issues

• Crew - check agents, see unread mail, send messages

• Engine Room - go into the guts, see if anything seized up, restart, run diagnostics and fixes

• Comms - read and send messages to everyone in Gas Town

• Settings - configure paths and switch themes

As a bonus, Beads-only mode is supported too - point it at a .beads directory and it works as a lightweight issue tracker without the full Gas Town setup.

What it doesn’t do (yet): seances or molecules. I’m not pretending I understand those properly.

It’s intentionally local-first: under the hood it just calls the Gas Town CLI locally - the UI is the only thing you’re adding and you can install anywhere on the same machine.

For anyone curious about Gas Town who wants an easy mode.

Install: npm i -g smorgasbord then smorgasbord (with gt on PATH and the mayor running).

Repo: https://github.com/djangobeatty/smorgasbord