September 23, 2026
AI-agent factories have hit a product wall: 5–10 billion tokens a day
On September 23, Hraness said his development factory uses 5–10 billion tokens a day across 24 DevinAI SWE-2 Max, 6 Codex Astra Ultra, and 2 Claude Code Fable Max in Zed. ThePrimeagen replied that he had not seen any worthwhile products from such factories.
ThePrimeagen
@theprimeagen
Apart from cute demos where words run across the screen, this is almost always completely useless. I may be wrong, but I have never seen anyone make anything worthwhile. I am thinking mainly of Steve Yegge's last two years: nothing but pure garbage. From the standpoint of a real product, "factories" and "factories of factories" look completely useless.
my software factory uses 5-10B tokens a day 24x @DevinAI SWE-2 Max 6x Codex Astra Ultra 2x Claude Code Fable Max running in @zeddotdev
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In April 2026, Steve Yegge introduced Gas City as a from-scratch rewrite of the Gas Town SDK. v1.0.0 now includes a ready-made pack with an exact Gas Town replica and migration for existing rigs and beads.
A builder, not a button. Gas City stores its schema in `city.toml` and launches agents through: - `tmux`, subprocess, exec, and ACP; - Kubernetes or herdr.
The standard setup requires `tmux`, `git`, `jq`, `pgrep`, and `lsof`. The default Beads provider requires Dolt 2.1.0+, `bd` 1.0.0, and `flock`, but the file provider in `city.toml` or `GC_BEADS=file` removes those dependencies. The quickstart begins with `brew install gascity`, followed by `gc init ~/bright-lights`, `gc start`, a Git repository, `gc rig add .`, `bd create ...`, and `gc session attach mayor`.
The boundaries are up to the author. Yegge leaves sandbox and MCP server integration to the user. He calls simple, low-risk tasks the first use case and does not recommend this kind of automation for medical or navigation systems in 2026.
The debate over AI agent factories will now be settled by the products they bring to production.
