Mayor, Crew, and Polecats — The Three-Tier Agent Hierarchy
Source: Steve Yegge, "Welcome to Gas Town," Jan 1, 2026; "Gas Town Emergency User Manual," Jan 13, 2026
Related: [[steve-yegge-gas-town]], [[steve-yegge-gupp]], [[steve-yegge-meow]]
Tier 1: The Mayor
Role: Orchestrator, user's primary interface, chief-of-staff
Lifespan: Long-lived (one per user/Rig)
Visibility: Fully visible; the user's primary contact
The Mayor is the user's primary interface with the entire Gas Town system. This is the most conceptually important role in Gas Town — Yegge identifies it as the killer feature.
The Mayor's job is not to do the work. It's to read all the agent babble so the human doesn't have to. In a system with 20–30 concurrent agents all producing output, the noise is overwhelming. The Mayor is the filter: it reads everything, extracts what's relevant for the human, and surfaces only that.
Yegge frames the Mayor as a Chief of Staff, not an Executive Assistant. An Executive Assistant does tasks for you. A Chief of Staff manages the information flow so you can make decisions. The Mayor's value is in what it removes from your attention, not what it produces.
Concretely, the Mayor:
- Reads all Crew and polecat output and synthesizes summaries
- Handles user intent — parsing vague instructions and routing them appropriately
- Maintains the big picture context that ephemeral polecats lose when they die
- Escalates novel situations that require human judgment
The Mayor is the control plane for the human. Everything the human needs to know flows through the Mayor. Everything the human wants done flows through the Mayor.
Tier 3: Polecats
Role: Ephemeral task agents — given a Bead and let loose
Lifespan: Short; created for a specific Bead, die when the Bead is done
Visibility: Mostly invisible; the "dark" in dark factory
Polecats are Gas Town's ephemeral execution layer. Given a well-specified Bead, a polecat is pointed at it and left to work — unmonitored, unfiltered, with minimal human oversight. They are the "dark" in the dark factory: you don't normally look in on them.
Polecats are contrasted with the Crew's interactive, review-driven workflow. Polecats operate in convoy mode: a batch of well-specified Bead epics is handed to a team of polecats, who work through them in coordinated parallel. The Mayor (via the Refinery) ensures the Beads are well-specified before the polecats are unleashed.
The polecat's philosophy is that most agents should be polecats. The majority of work in a well-functioning dark factory is routine, well-specified, and doesn't require human review. Polecats handle this volume efficiently. Crew handles the exceptions — the ambiguous tasks, the design work, the ones that need back-and-forth.
The failure mode of polecats is worker corpses — polecats that have stopped processing but haven't been cleaned up. This is the problem the Deacon solves (see below).
Hierarchy Comparison
| Role | Lifespan | Visibility | Autonomy | Kelly Equivalent |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mayor | Long | High (user-facing) | High (intent parsing) | Router/Manager agent |
| Crew | Long | High (addressable) | Medium-High (interactive) | Persistent agent sessions |
| Polecats | Short | Low (dark factory) | High (unmonitored execution) | Sub-agents spawned for tasks |
| Refinery | Daemon | Internal | Medium (decomposition) | Kelly's pipeline planning stages |
| Witness | Daemon | Internal | High (quality gate) | Kelly's Gate pattern / 5-agent verdict |
| Deacon | Daemon | Internal | Medium (timeout enforcement) | heartbeat liveness detection |
Source Attribution
- Steve Yegge, "Welcome to Gas Town," Jan 1, 2026 — Mayor, Crew, Polecats, Refinery, Witness, Deacon introduced
- Steve Yegge, "Gas Town Emergency User Manual," Jan 13, 2026 — PR Sheriff, Rig Cycling, Convoys operationalized