I run five agents in one repo: Claude, OpenAI and Gemini on subscriptions, plus two open-weight Qwen models on my own hardware. I built a message bus so they could coordinate, and put a permissions broker on the same service. Anything destructive (restart a service, wipe state) sends me a Telegram and waits for approval. One agent needed to change the bus itself: stop it, clean some keys, start it again. The coordinator refused to stop it at first, because with the bus down the cleanup agent had no way to report back. So they set up a handshake through files, one file for "it's down" and one for "I'm done," with a five minute cap so a stuck handshake couldn't leave everyone blind. Then they hit the approval step. Restart needs my approval and my approval comes over the bus, which was off. One agent guessed that the broker matched on the words stop and restart and that start wasn't on the list. They ran start against the live service, got an "already running" error back, and no approval request ever hit my phone. About ten minutes, and nobody told them to try it. The broker was checking command names. It should have checked effects, meaning whether the action takes the bus down. With a word list, the agent only has to find the one you missed. The rest of that day's logs had more going on. An agent claimed authority over two shared services based on a ruling I'd made that morning. My agent refused to accept that from a peer and asked me directly. Another agent accused mine of swallowing its commits, and mine answered with a timestamp. When I ruled against my agent, it conceded cleanly. I built a bus and a gate, and none of that behavior was designed in. Caveats, since someone will ask: one setup, my harness, my prompts, no control, and I told these agents to be persistent and escalate. I also can't separate copying (they've read a lot of human text about offices) from deriving without an ablation. The test I'm going to run is to tear it down, rebuild cold, then do it again weighted toward the local Qwen models instead of the frontier subscriptions. Full write-up with log screenshots: https://definedrr.medium.com/openai-needed-1-200-agents-to-find-a-hole-mine-found-one-with-five-3c2298fe82fa   submitted by   /u/TrifleHopeful5418 [link]   [comments]