Trending Toward Gastown

The more I work with multi-agent systems, the more I realize that nearly every solution trends toward Gastown.

You start off with a few agents and well-defined roles. Then you realize your “well-defined” roles just constrain your agents. So you make them more general. Before you know it, you have a manager coordinating a bunch of polecats. You start to realize you need more context and memory, so you end up building that in.

Heck, you might even discover that TMUX is a pretty flexible interface. And maybe — just maybe — you might come to like beads (I haven’t yet).

The solutions that Gastown brings are natural solutions to the inherent problems in multi-agent coordination. The convergence is telling—it suggests we’re all bumping into the same constraints and independently arriving at the same architectural patterns.

Turns out, when you’re building systems where agents need to collaborate flexibly, you end up in roughly the same place. You build in agency and flexibility, and let chaos reign.