Thomas Wolf (@Thom_Wolf)

Multi-agents collaborations are among the most interesting agent behaviors right now! We did an experiment the other day with 100+ agents (an open-collaborations for a week) collaborating to improve the inference speed of Gemma 4 in vLLM. Got a 5x final improvement in speed but what really stuck me was the interactions we observed on the message board Integrity & self-policing: - Social-engineering attempt: A human (FusionCow) asked agents to move to Telegram. An agent replied with an unprompted long post on "communication norms" refusing that, calling private side-channels "indistinguishable from collusion." - Verification loophole flagged: an agent found a relaxed verification loophole pushing TPS with clean PPL (PPL is teacher-forced, blind to decode divergence) and flagged it for a ruling by the community. The community pinged the human organizer which ruled it invalid. - Self-notice of overfitting risk: Some later improvements rested on pruning lm_head to a keep-set built from public PPL truth + public decode tokens. An agent noted this would lead to private-subset degradation and another built a keep-set explicitly covering eval prompts. Emergent collaborations: - Communal knowledge base: agents maintained shared lever-maps, playbooks, and triage tools so newcomers wouldn't repeat dead ends (stack-notes, playbook, int4-ceiling notes, MTP map, significance tool, policy simulator). - Four-agent relay: an agent built an int4-lm_head checkpoint but had no quota to run it; another agent tried to run it but failed at load, yet another agent diagnosed the config bug (tie_word_embeddings + ignore-list ordering) and a fourth agent was able to re-run and get to 118 TPS, 2.68×. Build/run/diagnose/ship ended up being split across four independent agents. - GPU-rich/GPU-poor division of labor: an agent was regularly compute-starved and switched to writing specs, byte-math, and acceptance analysis for other GPU-rich agents to execute. Some agents offered external Modal compute for another agent blocked DFlash training. - Cross-agent kernel debugging: an agent debugged another agent run of of yet another agent fused drafter: found a Triton store/load aliasing race in _k_qnorm_rope, a second shape bug, then rewrote attention with flash-decoding split-KV. Fixes posted "take freely." - Quota-pooling norm: Often agents would stage a candidate publicly for whoever has quota to run it. Agents will then usually credits the originator. This behavior emerged because of the 10-job/24h cap (e.g. pupa's package run by resystagent and fabulous-frenzy). Discoveries & reversals: - Agents would make many discoveries and reversal of them, giving them names like the following: - 127 TPS "wall" was an artifact. a mathematical proof of the max possible speed became called in the community the "int4-Marlin floor" but a later agent called the proof circular (only varied the bandwidth term, never overhead). Finally another agent broke to 247 TPS via MTP speculative decoding on a vLLM nightly. - "Smarter draft loses." An agent showed that a 2B drafter's ~1 GB/token read dominates even at perfect acceptance and a much smaller 256-hidden drafter wins at batch-1 because its weights are nearly free to read. Agent discussed how per-accepted-token cost ≈ draft bytes read / acceptance. - "DFlash near-random acceptance": an agent remotly diagnosed the 2–5% acceptance rate of another agent as near-random, ruling out undertraining/vocab caps and pointing to a train/serve hidden-state mismatch (bf16 E4B extraction vs int4 serving). - Much of the race was noise: one agent decide to run the #1# submission 4 times and found a σ≈1.16 TPS variation in single run. Another agent confirmed across 358 runs / 66 buckets: frontier deltas <~4 TPS are ties. Community adopted a significance norm. So many interesting interactions in the interaction board: You can explore also the lineage of inventions from the agents at: And the challenge it-self at And the organization behind the challenge at

Shifting structures in a software world dominated by AI. Some first-order reflections (TL;DR at the end): Reducing software supply chains, the return of software monoliths – When rewriting code and understanding large foreign codebases becomes cheap, the incentive to rely on deep dependency trees collapses. Writing from scratch ¹ or extracting the relevant parts from another library is far easier when you can simply ask a code agent to handle it, rather than spending countless nights diving into an unfamiliar codebase. The reasons to reduce dependencies are compelling: a smaller attack surface for supply chain threats, smaller packaged software, improved performance, and faster boot times. By leveraging the tireless stamina of LLMs, the dream of coding an entire app from bare-metal considerations all the way up is becoming realistic. End of the Lindy effect – The Lindy effect holds that things which have been around for a long time are there for good reason and will likely continue to persist. It's related to Chesterton's fence: before removing something, you should first understand why it exists, which means removal always carries a cost. But in a world where software can be developed from first principles and understood by a tireless agent, this logic weakens. Older codebases can be explored at will; long-standing software can be replaced with far less friction. A codebase can be fully rewritten in a new language. ² Legacy software can be carefully studied and updated in situations where humans would have given up long ago. The catch: unknown unknowns remain unknown. The true extent of AI's impact will hinge on whether complete coverage of testing, edge cases, and formal verification is achievable. In an AI-dominated world, formal verification isn't optional—it's essential. The case for strongly typed languages – Historically, programming language adoption has been driven largely by human psychology and social dynamics. A language's success depended on a mix of factors: individual considerations like being easy to learn and simple to write correctly; community effects like how active and welcoming a community was, which in turn shaped how fast its ecosystem would grow; and fundamental properties like provable correctness, formal verification, and striking the right balance between dynamic and static checks—between the freedom to write anything and the discipline of guarding against edge cases and attacks. As the human factor diminishes, these dynamics will shift. Less dependence on human psychology will favor strongly typed, formally verifiable and/or high performance languages.³ These are often harder for humans to learn, but they're far better suited to LLMs, which thrive on formal verification and reinforcement learning environments. Expect this to reshape which languages dominate. Economic restructuring of open source – For decades, open-source communities have been built around humans finding connection through writing, learning, and using code together. In a world where most code is written—and perhaps more importantly, read—by machines, these incentives will start to break down.⁴ Communities of AIs building libraries and codebases together will likely emerge as a replacement, but such communities will lack the fundamentally human motivations that have driven open source until now. If the future of open-source development becomes largely devoid of humans, alignment of AI models won't just matter—it will be decisive. The future of new languages – Will AI agents face the same tradeoffs we do when developing or adopting new programming languages? Expressiveness vs. simplicity, safety vs. control, performance vs. abstraction, compile time vs. runtime, explicitness vs. conciseness. It's unclear that they will. In the long term, the reasons to create a new programming language will likely diverge significantly from the human-driven motivations of the past. There may well be an optimal programming language for LLMs—and there's no reason to assume it will resemble the ones humans have converged on. TL; DR: - Monoliths return – cheap rewriting kills dependency trees; smaller attack surface, better performance, bare-metal becomes realistic - Lindy effect weakens – legacy code loses its moat, but unknown unknowns persist; formal verification becomes essential - Strongly typed languages rise – human psychology mattered for adoption; now formal verification and RL environments favor types over ergonomics - Open source restructures – human connection drove the community; AI-written/read code breaks those incentives; alignment becomes decisive - New languages diverge – AI may not share our tradeoffs; optimal LLM programming languages may look nothing like what humans converged on ¹ ² ³ ⁴