Steve Yegge, a longtime software engineer and blogger who spent the best part of two decades at Amazon and Google, has emerged as a major advocate for multi-agent software development — launching Gas Town at the start of 2026, and expanding it into a growing open-source ecosystem that now includes Wasteland and, more recently, Gas City.

To support this effort, Yegge has teamed up with agentic coding company Kilo to move those ideas beyond self-hosted experimentation, toward something with a little more structure.

Founded in March 2025, Kilo is an open-source, model-agnostic coding agent platform designed to work across environments including VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, and the command line. The company’s founding team includes GitLab co-founder and former CEO Sid Sijbrandij, who has positioned the project as an attempt to build a more transparent and extensible alternative to closed AI coding assistants.

Playing host

At its core, Gas Town is designed as a multi-agent orchestration system for software development. The project splits work across coordinated groups of specialized agents operating simultaneously against the same codebase, with different agents handling coding, testing, orchestration, review, and operational maintenance tasks.

The system organizes those agents into different roles inside persistent “towns,” with long-running agent systems managing engineering work across repositories and projects.

In the five months since launch, Gas Town’s backend has migrated to Dolt, a Git-backed database system that Yegge says was better suited to the project’s coordination-heavy architecture. He also says newer AI models haven’t reduced the need for orchestration in the way he originally hoped, with Gas Town still relying heavily on specialized agent roles — including “Dogs,” which effectively function as reliability and maintenance agents responsible for keeping long-running towns operational.

“The rest of the architecture has been stable,” Yegge explains to The New Stack. “I expected it to get simpler as the models advance, but that didn’t happen.”

Kilo first announced Gas Town by Kilo in early March as a hosted version of the orchestration system, positioning it as a way to remove much of the operational overhead associated with running Gas Town locally, including model routing, persistent infrastructure management, and agent coordination.

The hosted service launched initially through a beta waitlist, with Kilo CEO Scott Breitenother telling The New Stack that thousands of towns were created during that period across both individual developers and enterprise teams.

“You can think of Gas Town as a normal agent harness, but multiplied across many coordinated agents.”

“You can think of Gas Town as a normal agent harness, but multiplied across many coordinated agents,” Breitenother says.

According to Breitenother, the kinds of workloads running through Gas Town broadly mirror those already seen across the company’s other coding agent products.

“There are folks working on greenfield projects, legacy projects, and everything in between,” Breitenother says.

The hosted version essentially combines managed infrastructure, integrated model routing through Kilo Gateway, and a dedicated interface for monitoring agent activity across persistent “towns.” Breitenother says the platform also reduces much of the setup and operational overhead associated with running Gas Town locally, while customers have reported more efficient token usage through features such as suspending idle towns and separating lightweight orchestration tasks from heavier coding operations.

“The value is really the combination of all of it working together. Hosting is part of it, but the bigger thing is making Gas Town actually practical and usable for more developers.”

“I think the value is really the combination of all of it working together,” he says. “Hosting is part of it, but the bigger thing is making Gas Town actually practical and usable for more developers.

For Yegge, meanwhile, the hosted Kilo version, which enters general availability today, has both broadened Gas Town’s reach beyond the original self-hosting community and helped validate the project as a more credible platform for developers and companies evaluating multi-agent systems.

“It lent Gas Town some additional credibility as a usable orchestration solution — with Kilo being independent — and it also opened Gas Town up to a potentially much broader audience of people who prefer to work in an IDE,” Yegge says.

Enter the Wasteland

Alongside the general availability launch of Gas Town by Kilo, the company is also introducing integrated hosted support for the Wasteland — a separate but closely related project intended to link “a thousand Gas Towns” together into a shared trust and coordination network.

As Yegge describes it, the Wasteland allows developers and agents to post tasks, claim work, and validate completed contributions through a shared stamping system built on top of Dolt and Git infrastructure.

“We believe this is the ideally transparent and scalable way for agents and humans to work,” Yegge says.

The Wasteland has already started seeing early organic adoption, and Yegge says they are developing a blockchain-backed work ledger to give the system enterprise-grade tracking and verification.

Next up is Gas City, a broader open-source orchestration framework that Yegge announced at the tail-end of April, and which he says is “the next big step.”

Unlike Gas Town’s more fixed structure of mayors, dogs, and specialized coding agents, Gas City is intended to let users build different kinds of organizational hierarchies and orchestration systems around long-running AI workers.

It was initially built by members of the wider Gas Town community, namely Julian Knutsen and Chris Sells, though Yegge says it has effectively become the ecosystem’s new direction. The project also represents a realization of ideas Yegge first outlined in January around large-scale agent coordination systems.

“I am only lightly affiliated with the code,” Yegge wrote in the Gas City announcement post. “But it’s exactly what I wished for, and it is being run by far more serious and disciplined engineers than me.”