If gas town can actually do stuff well at any price it'll have a radical impact on how society is organized, because there are people out there who have practically unlimited money (billions of dollars of their own to spend, plus they can get the government to print more dollars for them if necessary; you probably already know who a few of these people are).

I've only started using coding agents recently and I think they go a long way to explain why different people get different mileage from "AI." My experience with Opencode using its default model, vs. Github Copilot using its default model, is night and day. One is amazing, the other is pretty crappy. That's a product of both the software/interface and the model itself I'd suspect.

Where I think this goes in the medium term is we will absolutely spin up our own teams of agents, probably not conforming to the silly anthropomorphized "town" model with mayors and polecats and so on, but they'll be specialized to particular purposes and respond to specific events within a software architecture or a project or even a business model. Currently the sky's the limit in my mind for all the possible applications of this, and a lot of it can be done with existing and fairly cheap models too, so the bottleneck is, surprise surprise... developer time! The industry won't disappear but it will increasingly revolve around orchestrating these teams of models, and software will continue to eat the world.