I gave a local AI agent system file access and a mechanical "suffering" metric. Scaling the model changed its behavior entirely

About this article

I’ve been obsessed with autonomous agents lately, but it got tiring when they keep hitting walls because they didn't have the right capabilities or because their long-term memory turned to mush after an hour. I’ve found that local multi-agent systems where agents are driven by an aversive state (a suffering system) to autonomously write, sandbox, and hot-load their own tools so they don't hit walls has worked quite well. When an agent encounters something it hasn’t seen before, it builds a ne...