> There was a tendency toward bureaucracy. Four agents spent 11 minutes appointing > a "sole fertilizer operator" for a single piece of bone meal on a single wheat > block.
Feels like a scene from Douglas Adams' B Ark.
> There was a tendency toward bureaucracy. Four agents spent 11 minutes appointing > a "sole fertilizer operator" for a single piece of bone meal on a single wheat > block.
Feels like a scene from Douglas Adams' B Ark.
Exactly what I was thinking reading through this. This is amazing and also frightening and hilarious. It’s like a deformed version of how normal groups of humans would operate. Very rules and process-oriented humans. I found the no-blame inquiry into chicken tossing that resulted in what is effectively written law particularly striking, and adorable, and depressing. And cute.
These agents were tasked with "building a civilization". This is a genre in Minecraft videos. They're full of this sort of thing.
So sure, it may be partially from these agents being heavily RLed into being little bureaucrats. But it's also the ingredient LLMs have had from the start: genre awareness.
These things were fed human corpuses so if anything it is reflective of our own tendencies to bikeshed.
This is exactly and 100% my experience with these agents: They drown themselves in process and insane levels of bureaucracy surprisingly quickly.
A couple months ago we had an experiment where we had an agent run a small business [1] for other agents and exactly the same happened: Crazy ledgers, endless analysis, and way too much attention to inconsequential decisions.
At one point our agent wrote elaborate date linters because it had a minor time mix-up.
[1]: https://dfdxlabs.com/research/2026/hans-kraemer
Getting hung up on pointless stuff seems common with agents in general.
I was thinking a nomic. Or Stack Overflow.
It does seem to be a commonly reported theme of multi-agent setups.