In Welcome to Gas Town , Steve Yegge generated a list of the 8 stages of agentic workflow evolution. I find myself wanting to deep link to it, so I’m replicating it here. If you want the tool itself rather than the model, I’ve written up what Gas Town is and how it works.

Yegge’s Developer-Agent Evolution Model

  1. Stage 1: Zero or Near-Zero AI: maybe code completions, sometimes ask Chat questions

  2. Stage 2: Coding agent in IDE, permissions turned on. A narrow coding agent in a sidebar asks your permission to run tools.

  3. Stage 3: Agent in IDE, YOLO mode: Trust goes up. You turn off permissions, agent gets wider.

  4. Stage 4: In IDE, wide agent: Your agent gradually grows to fill the screen. Code is just for diffs.

  5. Stage 5: CLI, single agent. YOLO. Diffs scroll by. You may or may not look at them.

  6. Stage 6: CLI, multi-agent, YOLO. You regularly use 3 to 5 parallel instances. You are very fast.

  7. Stage 7: 10+ agents, hand-managed. You are starting to push the limits of hand-management.

  8. Stage 8: Building your own orchestrator. You are on the frontier, automating your workflow.