I vibe coded a tiny MUD-style world sim where LLMs control each character. It's basically a little toy sandbox where LLMs can play around. There's no real goal to this, I just thought that it would be fun, like a more advanced tamagochi.
One of the issues I encountered initially was that the LLMs were repeating a small set of actions and never trying some of the more experimental actions. With a bit of prompt tweaking I was able to get them to branch out a bit, but it still feels like there's a lot of room for improvement on that front. I still haven't figured out how to instill a creative spark for exploration through my prompting skills.
It has been quite exciting to see how quickly a few simple rules can lead to emergent storytelling. One of the actions I added was the ability for the agents to pray to the creator of their world (i.e. me) along with the ability for me to respond in a separate cycle. The first prayer I received was from an agent that decided to wade into a river and kneel, just to offer a moment in stillness. Imagining it is still making me smile.
Unfortunately, I don't have access to enough compute to run a bigger experiment, but I think it would be really interesting to create lots of seed worlds / codebases which exist in a loop. With the twist being that after each cycle the agents can all suggest changes to their world. This would've previously been quite difficult, but I think it could be viable with current agentic programming capabilities. I wonder what a world with different LLM distributions would look like after a few iterations. What kind of worlds would Gemini, Claude, Grok, or ChatGPT create? And what if they're all put in the same world, which ones become the dominant force?
Sounds fun. Can't beat a good whimsical project!
I’ve been messing around with a similar project (but in a grimdark/cosmic horror setting). I was running into the same issue, agents getting stuck in a loop. What worked for me was adding dwarf fortress/rimworld like systems. The random events and systems influencing systems worked wonders for me.