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Software Factory FAQ

Direct answers about Gas City, Beads, supported coding agents, local execution visibility, team governance, deployment, and how to start.

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These are the questions that tend to block a Gas City evaluation. Each answer names the product that provides the capability.

What is Gas City?

Gas City is the MIT-licensed open software factory platform that runs on Beads. It runs customer-owned workflows and automations across configured coding agents. Your factory is the agents, workflows, prompts, skills, packs, and related settings you own.

The AI software factory guide explains the category.

Is Gas City open source?

Yes. The complete Gas City orchestrator is MIT-licensed open source and runs on infrastructure the developer controls.

Beads is open source too. Beads Team Server preview adds team governance and captures organizational Runs with organization-chosen retention. Gasworks is coming soon and will add the shared multi-operator factory.

Is Gas City an AI model or a coding agent?

No. Gas City orchestrates coding agents. Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, and other agents run through provider integrations while Gas City handles workflow progression, routing, automations, and local observation.

Which coding agents does Gas City support?

Gas City shipped seventeen built-in coding-agent integrations as of August 7, 2026. That count is a dated source observation, not a compatibility ceiling. The multi-agent compatibility guide explains how several agents can participate in one factory.

Are planner, reviewer, and worker fixed roles?

No. Packs define the factory’s agent roles and formula workflows. “Reviewer” is a role your factory defines, not a required platform type.

See Understanding packs.

What happens to work when an agent crashes?

The agent process can disappear while the work remains in Beads. A bead stores status, ownership, notes, and graph relationships outside the session. A replacement agent can read the same work and continue.

The Beads Guide covers the work model. The crash recovery guide focuses on the handoff.

Is a Beads work graph the same thing as a chat transcript?

No. A transcript records a conversation. A work graph records structured work and its relationships: parent-child hierarchy, blockers, discovered work, ownership, and status. It is queryable without replaying the agent’s conversation.

How is agent work management different from orchestration?

Beads manages durable work, relationships, and readiness. Orchestration advances that work through agents, workflows, gates, and recovery. Beads Team Server shares and governs team work and, in preview, retains organizational Runs; it is executor-neutral.

The orchestration guide explains how those layers cooperate when processes fail or work becomes blocked.

Does Gas City keep an audit trail of every run?

Gas City materializes a graph-workflow run as a root bead and child step beads. Its dashboard and API project the local run from retained bead lifecycle events and enrich it with live or linked execution detail. That local view is not a separately governed team record.

In the Beads Team Server preview, a capitalized Run is the private operational record stored in the organization’s shared location for the retention period the organization chooses. The memory and audit-trail guide separates durable work, local visibility, and retained team history.

What is Beads Team Server?

Beads Team Server is sharing beads with your team. Preview is available through design partnerships as managed SaaS or self-hosted inside the customer’s VPC. In that preview, it adds governed shared work, provenance, visibility, and APIs while letting the team keep its current agents and workflows. It captures Runs in the organization’s shared location and stores them for the retention period the organization chooses.

What is Gasworks?

Gasworks is the coming-soon team, multi-operator version of the Gas City factory path. It will include Beads Team Server and add shared workflows, automation, and live factory operation, with managed SaaS and customer-VPC placements planned.

Gasworks is not the hosted name for the local Gas City dashboard. It is a separate team product with a separate waitlist.

Can the commercial products run inside our VPC?

Beads Team Server preview is offered as managed SaaS or self-hosted inside the customer’s VPC. Gasworks has the same two placements planned when it becomes available.

VPC placement does not automatically make every configured coding agent or model endpoint private. Include those outbound dependencies in the deployment review.

How does Gas City handle secrets and untrusted input?

Gas City treats packs and city configuration as trusted operator code. Several orchestrator-side command paths strip inherited secret-looking environment variables, but operators can pass credentials deliberately through configuration. User-controlled bead or PR text should not be interpolated into shell commands.

Read the maintained trust-boundary reference before running third-party packs or exposing a supervisor beyond its default local posture.

How is Gas City different from an agent framework?

An agent framework usually gives developers primitives for writing an agent application. Gas City is a configured factory platform for coding agents working against durable work in real projects. It starts with inspectable workflows whose roles come from the packs you choose.

Use the agent orchestration evaluation rubric to compare interruption, recovery, routing, visibility, and operator load instead of comparing feature-list nouns.

Do I need Beads before I can use Gas City?

Gas City runs on Beads, and the normal Gas City setup uses bd with Dolt for its work store. The Gas City Quickstart lists the prerequisites and creates the first project and routed bead.

You can also use Beads on its own. Many developers start there because durable agent work is the first problem they need to solve.

Where should I start?

Choose the smallest current problem.

If a coding agent keeps losing plans, decisions, or next work, run the Beads Quickstart.

If you are manually coordinating several agent sessions through the same engineering process, run the Gas City Quickstart and inspect one workflow on a real repo.