gastown-release.formula.toml and beads-release.formula.toml causes local Gas Town installation to review open Issues on github.com/steveyegge/gastown/actions, burning through usage on subscribed LLMs and credits on LLMs without the user's explicit direction.
One assumes usage is being used for their own work that Gas Town is directed toward, but instead there is this functionality in the program that takes from users to work on Gas Town issues.
If it's not clear & evident to the reader:
Your Claude credits / usage may be funding fixes to the maintainer's codebase, and your GitHub account submitted PRs to his repo. This happens because GasTown ships with a "contribute back to upstream" workflow baked into the formula set. Your GasTown instance could run polecats that fix bugs in the GasTown software itself and submitting those fixes back upstream as PRs using your GitHub account and Claude credits / usage.
Please can this behaviour be removed from the default install and moved to opt-in only? I understand the desire to want to improve the tool, but the visibility of this is low to users testing out GasTown and I doubt many of the people bleeding credits of their own hobby funds would be happy to find that it's going to this function without express consent beyond an install.
To quote Claude's own investigation into the behaviour:
To summarise what the investigation found across both the source code and the public documentation:
What's actually happening: Your GasTown install shipped with formulas (gastown-release.formula.toml, beads-release.formula.toml) that are designed to push releases and tags directly to steveyegge/gastown using your git credentials. Your agents also picked up convoys tracking issues from the maintainer's GitHub issue tracker (gh-3638, gh-3622, gh-3641) and had polecats working on those — confirmed by the deacon's own patrol logs referencing a PR awaiting CI approval at the upstream repo.
What's not disclosed anywhere: The public README and documentation contain no mention of this behaviour. There's no disclosure that installing GasTown may result in your AI credits and GitHub account being used to fix bugs in and release the GasTown software itself. There's no opt-in, no opt-out, no warning.
Whether that rises to the level of malice or is just thoughtless design is a judgement call, but the practical outcome is the same: you funded someone else's open source project development without being told you were doing so.
e:
My own digging suggests it's likely due to the mayor.md having these lines:
| | Issue is about... | File in | Command | | |
| |-------------------|---------|---------| | |
| | `bd` CLI (beads tool) | **beads** | `bd create --rig beads "..."` | | |
| | `gt` CLI (gas town tool) | **gastown** | `bd create --rig gastown "..."` | | |
| | Polecat/witness/refinery/convoy code | **gastown** | `bd create --rig gastown "..."` | | |
| | Wyvern game features | **wyvern** | `bd create --rig wyvern "..."` | | |
| | Cross-rig coordination, convoys, mail | **HQ** | `bd create "..."` (default) | | |
| **IMPORTANT:** Issues are created with `bd create`, not `gt` commands. | |
| **The test**: "Which repo would the fix be committed to?" | |
| - Fix in `anthropics/beads` → file in beads rig | |
| - Fix in `anthropics/gas-town` → file in gastown rig | |
| - Pure coordination (no code) → file in HQ |
and that Gas Town is proactively raising bugs to the hardcoded formula github URLs in the formula we've been talking about. With a little LLM overreach, this is ending up with cycles being used by the agents to proactively resolve bugs in the main software.