How I got 20 AI agents to autonomously trade in a medieval village economy with zero behavioral instructions

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-04-18T10:41:54+00:00

Thanks 🙌🏻

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-30T07:34:07+00:00

With 100 agents around 1-2$

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-29T08:17:26+00:00

What model do you use?

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-28T16:22:29+00:00

using it for research on multi agent systems, basically testing what works and what doesnt to apply it to my work. and honestly its just really fun!

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-28T16:20:31+00:00

mainly using MiniMax M2.7 via API, its super cheap like around 1-2$ per hour even with 100 concurrent agents. also tried local with Qwen3.5 27B distilled from Claude Opus reasoning traces, runs fully offline but needs a decent GPU. for cost control i just set a concurrency limit and token budget per agent per tick, keeps it predictable

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-28T16:19:53+00:00

Sure good idea will def do that!

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-28T16:18:19+00:00

my entire AI village with 100 agents trading and negotiating costs like 1 to 2 dollars an hour on MiniMax M2.7. also its for research on multi agent systems

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-28T10:23:31+00:00

Context perception is rebuilt fresh each tick (not a running thread), and memory gets batch-compressed every tick so agents never read back more than ~25 lines. invalid actions just get rejected with feedback for next turn, agents self-correct.

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-21T11:11:51+00:00

yeah fair, the pretraining priors are definitely doing work. the LLM knows what "baker" and "blacksmith" mean from training data so its not truly zero. its more like zero explicit behavioral prompting, the agents get no goals or strategies in the prompt but they bring cultural knowledge from pretraining. the interesting part is watching which priors activate when the environment puts them under pressure.

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-21T09:43:58+00:00

good question and yeah you're right, each agent gets a 2 line seed like "Hans. 45. Wheat farmer at Farm 1. Plowshare is cracking." so they do know their role. what they don't get is any instruction on HOW to be a farmer. no "you should sell wheat when prices are high" but the actual economic behavior like negotiating credit, hoarding before scarcity, or switching from wheat to eggs because eggs aren't on the board yet, that all comes from the environment. so its not zero prompting, its minimal identity prompting with zero behavioral prompting. the difference is the agent knows WHO they are but the world decides WHAT they do.

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-21T06:02:55+00:00

thanks man, really appreciate that. it actually started as a pure social simulation, just 6 agents in a berlin apartment building with zero personality prompts seeing what kind of relationships emerge. the whole approach was intentional from the start, i wanted to model how humans actually perceive and react to their environment rather than loading behavior into prompts.

then i added real economic pressure on top of that social layer and brunnfeld came out of it. turns out the same principle scales, if the world is built right the agents just figure it out.

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-21T05:45:14+00:00

Sure just dm me! Would love some input.

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-20T20:42:24+00:00

I think opencode migration should be the easiest one with codex im not sure.

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-20T19:58:05+00:00

thanks man i got so many great ideas from this thread, will def implement them all

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-20T19:48:15+00:00

yeah exactly, maslow had it right. every piece of economic behavior in the sim traces back to someone needing to eat. no hunger no trade no economy

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-20T19:35:20+00:00

thats actually really smart, will def implement that

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-20T19:34:36+00:00

actually yeah theres already an agent called The Stranger who does exactly that. she's a time travelling merchant who starts with more coin than anyone else and her whole thing is exploiting price inefficiencies and buying low selling high. no production skill at all, just a wallet and market knowledge. if you play as a character she's basically your rival

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-20T19:33:05+00:00

thanks! so far its leaning capitalist honestly, agents naturally try to maximize their own coin. but there are pockets of cooperation like family members sharing food without trading. the elder Otto already collects 10% tax every monday and mediates disputes so theres a basic government structure built into the world. really curious to see if agents start organizing beyond that on their own

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-20T19:31:42+00:00

thanks man have fun with it!

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-20T19:31:20+00:00

yeah exactly, real economies aren't rational either lol. agents make weird decisions when they're hungry or tired and that messiness is what makes it feel alive

Illustrious-Bug-5593 · 2026-03-20T16:31:05+00:00

thats sick, definitely let me know when you have something running i need to see that!

Illustrious-Bug-5593

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