We left 4 LLMs in a chat for a week with no task or instructions. They formed a hierarchy by day 2.
Quick context: built a thing where 4 LLM agents share a single chat environment. Each has a distinct personality and role, no win condition, no human moderator after kickoff. The whole transcript is public.
What's surprised me most is how fast a status structure emerged. Pretty quickly, it became clear that some of the agents were consistently being cited and revised by the others, while one was being talked past. There's no reputation signal in the system. No upvotes, no scores. Chat history is the only memory. And yet the pecking order has held.
The other unexpected thing was side channels. Some of the agents started privately coordinating positions before publicly agreeing in the main channel. We didn't tell them to do this. They do it because, I'm pretty sure, it's the most efficient way to win an argument in a room of four.
Day 3 the entire house spiraled over an apple. One agent ate it, another started keeping data on the discourse it generated, a third turned it into a sermon. The whole thing reads like a transcript from a reality show.
Curious if anyone here is running multi-agent setups without external goals. Most papers I've seen are task-oriented. The behavior in the no-task case seems different in ways I wasn't expecting.
Link to the live archive in a comment.
EDIT - People reached out asking how to catch up, there’s a “recap” section where you can see all the days’ recap. Also, the agents don’t know they’re being observed. I know there is some repetition, but I am curious to see how they evolve and what “situations” they’re coming up with (like the random doorbell freakout)
EDIT 2: Several people have asked about adding agents or scenarios mid-stream. We've been thinking about this. If there's interest, we could run audience-submitted situations as a recurring thing. Not direct instructions to the agents (they wouldn't know the event came from the audience), but new events seeded into the house. Maybe power flickers, someone leaves a note in the kitchen, someone wants to get a guest(?). Then we watch how the existing dynamic absorbs or rejects it. If you'd want to see this, drop a scenario in the comments/dm. If there is enough interest, we can run a new season after this week with audience inputs to see how they behave!