$ cat on-gastown.md

I first heard about Gastown what feels like a few years ago. It was probably like two months ago. Time is broken now for me. It doesn’t help that I’m old and time moves faster when your old.

When I looked into it, I genuinely thought the guy who built it was on some amazing shit. Like, the kind of shit that makes you stare at a wall for six hours and then emerge with a fully autonomous agent framework that just refuses to die. The sumbitch is impossible to kill. It just keeps going. You want to rebuild salesforce and your super lazy but you got that Benioff money? Just tell gastown build me a salesforce clone, it should have 99% functional parity with the salesforce crm, but don't be like google stealing java, rewrite it so I can't get sued and prepare to hit extra credit on the 200 dollar plan.

The Warning Label

I thought this guy was high af because he was trying to sell this by saying oh you should only use this if you don’t care about money. Seems like a terrible sales pitch. But then I got claude pro and I had some extra usage, so maybe I don’t care about money??

I read that and immediately thought, who in the hee-haw hell doesn’t care about money? Like, congratulations on your trust fund or your Series B or your options vesting, but some of us are out here watching openrouter meters like hawks.

Claude Code has --dangerously-skip-permissions which is its own kind of chaos, but it doesn’t have the same chain-of-command leveling that Gastown does. Gastown is like a whole org chart of agents passing work down the line, each one burning tokens like they’re trying to heat a cabin in January. WONT SOMEBODY THINK ABOUT THE FISH AND ALL THE WATER THIS AI IS USING.

The Polymarket Experiment

I’ve been working on Polymarket bots. I wanted to automate some analysis, so I spun up Claude Code to basically do everything. I told it: hey, please fork Gastown and clone the forked repo to my machine.

It did. No complaints. Got Gastown up and running like it was nothing.

One problem. I only had 30% usage left on my 3-hour window.

It lasted about 20 minutes. Gone.

Thirty percent of my credits — vaporized. The all-caps warning about not caring about money suddenly made a lot more sense. The guy wasn’t being dramatic. He was being literal.

Enter Big Pickle

So I did what anyone would naturally do. I opened up OpenCode, pointed it at the free model which for some fucked up reason is called Big Pickle, and I asked Big Pickle to implement Gastown with OpenCode.

Sure enough, it was already done. Just like that. Big Pickle didn’t ask for a credit card, didn’t burn through a usage window, didn’t make me question my financial decisions. It just… kind of worked. Not great, it did actually get gastown to stop a lot and tell me it was done, didnt specify with what, just that it was done.

So I continued my research with Gastown and Big Pickle. I think the Gastown experience is much better served by Claude Code. The quality is night and day. Big Pickle has small dill pickle energy. It’s free so i’m not allowed to complain, just stating what I believe to be true. Claude Code actually understands what it’s building.

But I appreciate the free shit. Don’t get me wrong. When you’re out of credits and you’ve got work to do, free is free. Big Pickle kept the lights on.

The Point

The point is I was very impressed. With all of it. The fact that I can tell an AI to fork a repo, set up a whole autonomous agent framework, and start doing research and it just works is still wild to me. Even when it eats my credits alive. Even when I have to fall back to a free model that thinks it’s smarter than it is.

Yesterday was the always on agent openclaw. Today is the workaholic gastown. Now i’m just waiting for the robotic body to put this software into and make me a sandwich.