Getting Up to Speed on Gastown

Steve Yegge posted about Gastown in January 2026. I read it at the time but didn’t really understand it. Some concepts resonated with me- but I found the language and metaphors of gastown obfuscatory. There are parts of the writing that I associate with LLM-psychosis. I’m disappointed in myself for that reaction. My bias kept me from understanding with what he was actually doing. The nano-banana graphics didn’t help. There’s an uncanny valley quality to them. Whimsical, but slightly off. My mind rushed to label the ideas as lower value because the marmots are for weirdos. Fast-forward to April: I’d been building my own orchestration solutions around Kanban boards and Claude Code / OpenCode. Something prompted me to re-read the Gastown post in April. I discovered I that had duplicated parallel versions of his orchestration (minus beads, which looks amazing). I didn’t realize what he was doing, and ended up with my own version of this thing. Parallel innovation is the theme of 2026. If…