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Contributions/AI experiments

An experimental lab by César Zea

Slow
Thinker.

How do AI agents
influence each other?

I built Slow Thinker to investigate and refine how AI agents work together: which ideas survive, how positions change, how much each round improves the result, and when it is worth stopping.

Each agent runs on a different LLM and can receive its own prompt. The experiments study how their differences in alignment and their instructions shape the collaboration. Here I share the experiments, the reports, and what I learn from examining them.

Inside the collaboration5 agents · 4 rounds · 20 proposals
Five agents' proposals across four rounds, with connections showing estimated transfers of steps and a final vote.
Each box is a proposal. Connections trace steps retained or adopted between rounds, using title similarity; thicker lines represent more steps.What this measure can miss
/ 01 — Why I built it

The result is
only part of
the story.

I want to understand how a group gets to its answer. Which agent introduces an idea? Who develops it? What disappears as the proposals become more alike?

I write the code, run the experiments, and inspect the traces to connect those questions to what actually happened. The aim is to use that evidence to improve the collaboration process and experiment again.

Influence

What survives?

Follow contributions through revisions, adoption by peers, and the final selection.

Behavior

Who changes their mind?

Examine how agents defend, revise, or abandon their positions as they encounter other proposals, how that differs between LLMs, and how their prompts change it.

Progress

Is another round worth it?

Measure how much each round improves the answer and up to what point, to know when another round no longer justifies its time and cost.

The test challenges are deliberately difficult. Their purpose is to expose collaboration behavior. Final answers may be useful, wrong, infeasible, or even absurd. Those outcomes are part of the study.

/ 02 — The current starting point

Propose. Share.
Revise. Vote.

Today, Slow Thinker implements one collaboration mechanism: independent proposals, shared refinement rounds, and a final vote. Participants, each agent's LLM and prompt, and round counts are configurable; an agent can even be told to sabotage the process. The current experiments use structured action plans as their common format.

  1. 01

    Propose

    Each agent tackles the same challenge independently. The first proposals are produced in parallel.

  2. 02

    Share

    Every agent receives all the proposals from the previous round.

  3. 03

    Revise

    Agents can retain, adopt, correct, or replace ideas. This repeats for the configured refinement rounds.

  4. 04

    Vote

    Voters choose among the final proposals with the authoring agents hidden, and explain their choices.

Report showing the estimated origin of steps in each agent's proposals across four rounds, and the composition of the selected plan.
How contributions evolve through this cycle: each bar is a proposal, and colors estimate the origin of its steps. The last bar shows the selected plan. Attribution uses title similarity.Explore the contributions ↗
/ 03 — Read the evidence

A way into
the report.

Every run preserves proposals, prompts, responses, votes, timing, and costs. The interactive report brings them together. Start with a question, then follow it back to the underlying material.

Influence matrix

Who picks up
whose ideas?

The matrix compares proposals across consecutive rounds. “Same titles” reports matches calculated by the program. “Analyst sees” adds an LLM's interpretation of adoption and rejection.

The two can disagree. Looking at that disagreement is part of the work.

Explore the influence matrix ↗
Influence matrix distinguishing computed title matches from ideas the analyst considers adopted or rejected.
Calculated matches and analyst interpretations are different kinds of evidence. Click the image to enlarge it.
Process evaluation

What improved?
What was lost?

An optional LLM analyst examines the finished run: convergence, criticism, regressions, and the loss of alternatives.

This analysis happens after collaboration. It does not feed back into the rounds or change the selected proposal. Its conclusions can be checked against the original responses.

Read the process evaluation ↗
The analyst's evaluation of the collaboration, with observations, issues, and suggested process changes.
The analyst's assessment is an interpretation of this run. It is not an independent validation of the solution.
/ 04 — An observation

An idea survives.
Its attribution
disappears.

21 September 2026 · Five-agent run · Executor 0.1.5

In this run, automatic attribution credits the GPT agent with zero steps in the selected plan. Reading the proposals reveals something that the title comparison misses.

  1. Initial proposal · GPT

    “Install immediate minimum controls”

    The step includes a provisional seven-day process for dealing with incidents while the full operating model is established.

  2. Next round · Opus

    “Seven-day interim command bridge”

    The Opus agent incorporates that approach in its next proposal. The content carries forward under a different title.

  3. Selected plan · Opus

    The idea remains.

    The provisional process survives further revisions. The analyst identifies the adoption; automatic lineage does not preserve the connection to the GPT agent.

Current automatic attribution relies on step-title similarity. This example shows why the next planned version will follow the meaning and transformation of ideas, including contributions shared between agents.

Inspect the original proposals

A vote, consensus, or favorable analyst assessment does not establish correctness. A single run also cannot establish that one LLM is generally more influential or useful than another.

/ 05 — Experiment library

Open the run.
Follow the ideas.

Explore the full library by run or by prompt, including earlier analyses. Each report includes the full challenge and configuration.

The two featured runs below tackle the same software incident-management challenge. Their data downloads contain the saved JSON records, including the analyst's output.

01
21 Sep 2026Featured run

Five agents on five LLMs, four rounds.

Trace how proposals absorb contributions from other agents, and inspect the gap between title-based attribution and the analyst's reading.

Opus 5 · GPT-5.6-sol · Qwen 3.8 Max · Grok 4.6 · DeepSeek V4 Pro

Agents
5
Total rounds
4
Proposals
20
Executor
0.1.5
02
21 Sep 2026Earlier experiment

Three agents on three LLMs, three rounds.

A smaller group tackling the same challenge. Follow the initial alternatives, their revisions, and the reasons given in the final vote.

Claude Haiku 4.5 · DeepSeek Flash · Qwen 3.8 Flash

Agents
3
Total rounds
3
Proposals
9
Executor
0.1.2

The LLM names above are the identifiers recorded in these runs. In both runs every agent received the same instructions; only the LLM and its settings changed. The experiments differ in participants, round counts, and executor versions; they are exploratory examples, not a controlled comparison of LLM performance.

REFERENCE LIBRARY

Understand every view.
Inspect every method.

The documentation follows the complete experiment: configuration, case definition, agents and rounds, execution, analysis, and report generation. Every reference entry identifies the version it describes.

User reference

Run it. Read it.

Follow the workflow and understand every report field, chart and control, with real screenshots and links to the interactive examples.

Open the user reference →
Technical reference

Follow the implementation.

Configuration fields, provider adapters, saved records, analysis schemas and the algorithms behind attribution, timing and costs.

Open the technical reference →
Versions & changes

Keep the context.

Distinguish the current implementation from an older run. Find a report element by name and follow the project’s change history.

Browse all documentation →
/ 06 — What comes next

Better questions.
Better experiments.

The broader aim is to compare collaboration processes, LLM combinations, prompts, and iteration counts, then use the results to improve the next experiment.

Next planned version

Follow the meaning.

Recognize ideas across changes in title and wording. Track how they combine, change, or disappear, and attribute shared contributions more faithfully.

Broader direction

Vary the collaboration.

Define processes in JSON: message exchanges, supervision, critics, devil's advocates, conditional paths, and loops. Today, JSON configures the existing round-based process.

An experiment to test

Bring critique into the loop.

Introduce a critical evaluator from a chosen round, then repeat contributions, critique, and revision. Examine whether resolving substantive objections leads to better outcomes.

Sustained improvement could indicate that further iteration may converge toward a correct result. That is a hypothesis to test against the outcome; convergence alone does not demonstrate success.

Built and studied in the open

An experiment worth discussing?

I welcome difficult test cases, alternative interpretations, and ideas for evaluating collaboration. Each new observation is a reason to revisit the process.

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