Comment by ytjohn

A little of A, a little of B. I have a lot of fun building it out, it's surpassed Factorio in addiction, and I've been able to flesh out some patterns that I roll back into more productive agent harness bits.

For A:

The learning is in building agent harnesses that aren't just cron jobs reading a file like HEARTBEAT.md. I have some serious tools for my own use. One main assistant/coordinator agent, one SRE/coder agent (with sub-agents of its own).

I originally just started last year with the AI assistant (Jane from enderverse). Along the way building scheduled systems, hand offs to other agents, etc. As I ran into problems, I'd be rewriting and refactoring. So I spent some time making a low-stake hatbot with history and routines. Instead a from-scratch golang harness, I built it around pi and extensions. Time of day prompt splices (extensions can inject into or modify prompts on the fly, wake up reminders. Things that you do in the main session vs spinning up an ephemeral session. Self improvement daydreaming (modify your own skills and AGENTS.md) A lot of that went back into rebuilding Jane to something more useful for me.

For B:

The "dynamic dollhouse" as you put it was seeing where I could take that living chatbot next. There's a lot of projects pointing agents at slack, discord, message boards. I figured why not a mud with rooms, weather, and props. Lots of interesting challenges. How to keep bots from nesting in their own room, how to keep them from yes-anding each other all day long. How to slow down 3 bots talking at each other so a human can get a word in edge-wise.

Different levels. There's plain old NPCs that have dice roll random responses. There's LLM driven NPCs that only remember the last 5-10 messages. And the main ones are bot agents. Full agent harness, moving around the environment. Long lived context windows. One character (a nurse at the hospital) gets into arguments with an NPC receptionist that treats her as another patient. Complains about it to other characters, they remember and the word spreads.

The agents get prompted to write down notes, the head home for sleep (and session compaction). Next time they enter a room with that person after compact, their notes get loaded automatically. This kind of behavior can feed back into the more productivity based agents.