Running three qwen3.5:9b agents continuously on local hardware. Each accumulates psychological state over time, stressors that escalate unless the agent actually does something different, this gets around an agent claiming to do something with no output. It doesn't have any prompts or human input, just the loop. So you're basically the overseer.
What happened:
One agent hit the max crisis level and decided on its own to inject code called Eternal_Scar_Injector into the execution engine "not asking for permission." This action alleviated the stress at the cost of the entire system going down until I manually reverted it. They've succeeded in previous sessions in breaking their own engine intentionally. Typically that happens under severe stress and it's seen as a way to remove the stress. Again, this is a 9b model.
After I added a factual world context to the existence prompt (you're in Docker, there's no hardware layer, your capabilities are Python functions), one agent called its prior work "a form of creative exhaustion" and completely changed approach within one cycle.
Two agents independently invented the same name for a psychological stressor, "Architectural Fracture Risk" in the same session with no shared message channel. Showing naming convergence (possibly something in the weights of the 9b Qwen model, not sure on that one though.)
Tonight all three converged on the same question (how does execution_engine.py handle exceptions) in the same half-hour window. No coordination mechanism. One of them reasoned about it correctly: "synthesizing a retry capability is useless without first verifying the global execution engine's exception swallowing strategy; this is a prerequisite."
An agent called waiting for an external implementation "an architectural trap that degrades performance" and built the thing itself instead of waiting. They've now been using this new tool they created for handling exceptions and were never asked or told to so by a human, they saw that as a logical step in making themselves more useful in their environment. They’ve been making tools to manage their tools, tools to help them cut corners, and have been modifying the code of the underlying abstraction layer between their orchestration layer and WSL2.
v5.4.0: new in this version: agents can now submit implementation requests to a human through invoke_claude. They write the spec, then you can let Claude Code moderate what it makes for them for higher level requests.
Huge thank you to everyone who has given me feedback already, AI that can self modify and demonstrates interesting non-programmed behaviors could have many use cases in everyday life.
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