January 2026
I had always seen the non-deterministic behavior of LLM’s as the shortcoming with code generation, but this comment really had me realizing that doing things incorrectly and unconventionally is how you experiment and come up with new ways to build things
Non-deterministic behavior is not only the path for innovation, but it is also how nature works. Maybe the machines will use this natural non-deterministic nature of building to create software we couldn’t imagine in our tightly controlled box of deterministic code writing.
That is not to say we want the software that runs to be non-deterministic, but the path to getting deterministic software itself doesn’t need to be deterministic.
Gas Town is an interesting endeavor by Steve Yegge. Steve has long been warning that the IDE as we know it will be obsolete and replaced by AI Coding Agent Orchestrators. Gas Town is the result of several iterations into a workable orchestrator.
It is an extremely complicated workflow with a comprehensive article to help explain. Here are some highlights:
The focus is throughput: creation and correction at the speed of thought.
Gas Town workers are regular coding agents, each prompted to play one of seven well-defined worker roles.
The most fundamental workflow in Gas Town is the handoff,
gt handoff, or the/handoffcommand, or just say, “let’s hand off”.
Just remember the Golden Rules:
- Do not use Gas Town if you do not juggle at least five Claude Codes at once, daily.
- Do not use Gas Town if you care about money.
- Do not use Gas Town if you are more than 4 feet tall. I want to tower impressively at meet-ups, like Sauron.
- Do not use Gas Town.
Finally took a look at David Crawshaw’s new project exe.dev , a slick new service for spinning up virtual machines in seconds. It’s a subscription service that gives you access to VM’s with persistant disks for a really great price. Enough is enough and I am slowly iterating through creating my own end to end agent orchestration system where I can manage projects as a HOTL (Human on the loop; shoutout Geoffrey Huntley ).
Why it’s perfect for coding agents
What really blows me away is how perfect it is for coding agents. I set up an environment in minutes, and it worked flawlessly:
- Secure sandboxing – lets agents run wild without risking your main machine
- Built-in agent support – they provide an agent called Shelley but I’m using Amp right now
- Instant HTTPS proxies – share web apps immediately
- Private-by-default sharing – keep your work secure