Gas Town

Plain English. Steve Yegge's name for the agent-orchestration tier he calls a "dark factory": fleets of coding agents coordinated by an overseer layer, with humans supervising the factory rather than driving each agent. Yegge has since reworked the idea into Gas City, an SDK for building such factories. The Mad Max name is the point — it is meant to be loud, fast and slightly dangerous.

Why it moves money. Yegge states the mechanic plainly: his claim is that a small team of three to five engineers running such a factory can credibly replace seven-figure SaaS bills, converting recurring rent into an in-house compounding asset. In Mark Pesce's four-tier harness hierarchy, the dark factory is the third tier — past the copilot, before the self-designing meta-harness. If the claim holds at any scale, it is a direct repricing mechanism for the SaaS sector.

What to watch. Documented dark-factory deployments with named displaced spend — the claim is specific enough to falsify, which is what makes it worth tracking.

From the signals. Gas City: Yegge's claim that 3–5 engineers replace seven-figure SaaS bills. Pesce's harness hierarchy places Gas Town as the dark-factory tier. Yegge on the end of human code review, with the token bill attached.