> 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.
Feels like a scene from Douglas Adams' B Ark.
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.
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.
That sounds like over-thinking failure modes I see sometimes. (Can manifest as neurotic or autistic style, e.g. second guessing or ultra detail focused.)
Keep this in mind when you see articles about how "an AI agent uncovered a thousand issues in our codebase overnight". A great many of those "issues" end up being that some process was not bureaucratic enough.