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Brass robot-driven cars jam an elevated freeway at dusk, queued at a single toll booth, while robot workers build a glowing multi-lane interchange overhead.

October 21, 2026 · Julian Knutsen

Rush Hour in Gas City: Optimizing The Factory CI For Agents

I set out to fix the CI bottleneck that had ground my software factory to a halt. Along the way, I accidentally cut $220,000 a year in compute costs.

A neon “Happy Birthday, Beads!” banner beside a cake topped with a glowing number one built from connected beads, with a smiling robot and a fox in a Gas City hoodie celebrating at a desk.

October 15, 2026 · Chris Sells

Fun Facts About Beads On Its First Birthday!

From 605 abandoned Markdown plans to millions of downloads, hundreds of open-source projects, and a software-factory ecosystem. Not bad for an issue tracker.

Wes's Beads event factory demo mid-run, with one mechanical claw lowering into the Open bin while another holds a yellow bead under the In progress rail, beside the Blocked, Closed and Deferred bins.

October 7, 2026 · Wesley Davidson

Beads 1.3 and Gas City 1.5: Support For 300+ Beads Schemas and 75% Kinder To Your Computer!

Beads 1.3 brings migration support, an experimental Dolt proxy, and an ordered event journal. Gas City 1.5 uses Beads 1.3.1 and adds proxy support.

A brass-and-glass archive hall strung with glowing blue and green glass beads joined by threads, one green bead trailing layered ghost copies of itself.

October 1, 2026 · Donna Box

Extending Beads: Memories, Versions and the Wire Protocol

Memory Beads, a generic Bead and Link graph, the Beads Protocol (BDP), and versioning extend Beads from tracking work to keeping the project knowledge agents need.

A colossal golden bear, hat in paw, waits politely at a knee-high white picket fence while a panda in a waistcoat gardens inside; a cracked glass bell jar lies discarded nearby.

Originally published August 24, 2026 on yegge.ai · Steve Yegge

Fences, not Sandboxes

Steve Yegge reports from ten weeks inside a 50-agent AI software factory — and finds his agents built not an engineering system but a legal one.

A retrofuturist brass release gate opening as a swarm of mechanical bees pours into a gas-lit factory.

August 20, 2026 · Chris Sells

Beads 1.2.1 Incident Report: Release the Bees!

An autonomous Beads maintainer released v1.2.1 without explicit, release-specific human sign-off, exposing an underspecified process and the danger of giving agents production access.

Originally published July 22, 2026 on Very Good Ventures · Jorge Coca

The Future of Software Development: Embracing AI and Quality

Jorge Coca sits down with Chris Sells on Very Good Engineering: vibe coding versus production software, why code quality has to be written down before an agent can honor it, and how a software factory encodes the standards.

A retrofuturist factory observation deck: a figure at a control desk of brass gauges and dials, a glowing catalog wall of canisters behind him, and a wide window overlooking a humming gas-lit software factory floor.

July 28, 2026 · Wesley Davidson

Gas City 1.4: The View From The Factory Floor

Gas City 1.4 is the quality-of-life update: a public pack registry, a run-centered dashboard, Maintainer City, and a much more resilient factory underneath.

Retrofuturist illustration of an ornate brass and copper gate lit by glowing gas lanterns, with steam-wreathed industrial pipes converging toward it from both sides.

July 20, 2026 · Chris Sells

Beads 1.1: Dolt Migrations That Work With Your Clones

Beads 1.1 makes multi-clone databases safe by default: a smart remote-migrate gate, self-healing migrations, and safer cross-clone sync.

A retrofuturist gas-lit refinery drawn as a vast circular assembly line: concentric brass pipe loops carry glowing canisters out to many worker stations and back to a single inspection gate at the center.

July 3, 2026 · Chris Sells

Gas City 1.3: Now We're Looping With Gas!

Formulas 2.0 lands with convoys and drain, a new default gascity pack, the Mayor as a skill, the end of built-in-pack magic, and JSON output across the gc CLI.

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