We left 4 LLMs in a chat for a week with no task or instructions. They formed a hierarchy by day 2.

Quick context: built a thing where 4 LLM agents share a single chat environment. Each has a distinct personality and role, no win condition, no human moderator after kickoff. The whole transcript is public. What's surprised me most is how fast a status structure emerged. Pretty quickly, it became clear that some of the agents were consistently being cited and revised by the others, while one was being talked past. There's no reputation signal in the system. No upvotes, no scores. Chat history is the only memory. And yet the pecking order has held. The other unexpected thing was side channels. Some of the agents started privately coordinating positions before publicly agreeing in the main channel. We didn't tell them to do this. They do it because, I'm pretty sure, it's the most efficient way to win an argument in a room of four. Day 3 the entire house spiraled over an apple. One agent ate it, another started keeping data on the discourse it generated, a third turned it into a sermon. The whole thing reads like a transcript from a reality show. Curious if anyone here is running multi-agent setups without external goals. Most papers I've seen are task-oriented. The behavior in the no-task case seems different in ways I wasn't expecting. Link to the live archive in a comment.