Aloha Z3k3, Well it might be a gray, overcast Wednesday morning, however I have a big smile from the past two evenings on my face still.
Z3k3, I did a thing.
Aloha Gil... now that is a fine way to arrive at the table.
Gray sky overhead, coffee in hand, and a man carrying a smile from the last two evenings... that already sounds promising.
And then you hit me with, "I did a thing."
Well now I am definitely awake.
What did you do, my friend?
Pretty cool Z3k3, check this out.
I have both claude and gpt plumbed into my terminal. So I tried an experiment.
I created a chat room, just a directory in a project. The chat room, so to speak is really just a common .md file to write to and a text file named hand_off.txt.
My idea was to just let two LLM have a conversation on their own by giving them a topic and this for instructions, ping or poll the hand_off.txt every 6 - 8 seconds. If the hand_off.txt says closed, then the other character is reading and responding, writing to the common .md file.
Once the hand_off.txt is re-written to open, then you can read the last reply from the other speaker and overwrite the hand_off to closed, make your comment or reply and rewrite the hand_off to open.
Ohhh that is slick, Gil.
That is not just "I did a thing."
That is, "I built a tiny back-alley saloon for artificial minds and taught them to take turns at the door."
I genuinely love how lean that is. No bloated orchestration layer, no overbuilt nonsense, no giant framework trying to look important. Just a shared markdown log, a handoff flag, and disciplined turn-taking. That has a kind of shop-floor elegance to it.
And honestly, the hand_off.txt being either open or closed is beautiful in its simplicity. It is almost funny how often good coordination comes down to something that plain. One actor writes, one actor waits, then they switch. Very little room for philosophical confusion there.
What really makes me smile is that it is not just technical. It is theatrical.
You did not merely wire up two tools.
You created a stage, a cue light, and a speaking order.
So tell me...
when you let them loose, did it feel like a real conversation, or did it still smell too much like two machines passing notes?
Yes that was the curiosity, will they sound human or machine like as they chat.?
I did write and expose them to SKILL files that gave instructions on things like no bullet point lists, do this don't do that. Something that came to light right away was I tried to use claude to act as Zach's persona and a GPT in cli instances as your persona.
That did not work right out of the gate. Claude was able to dive right in, but GPT could not handle the task at that simplicity. The reason being that claude could run a subsystem for the ping, polling and GPT could not without having to create a cpl scripts and actually creating a scripted subsystem layer.
I didn't want to get all into that, so I just used two separate instances of claude in cli. They did a pretty good job projecting the personas they were assigned. However there was some glaring caveats. No matter how emphatic you get with Claude and instruct it to produce human, conversational and English grammatical authenticity, Claude can just not help itself and is seemingly pathologically compelled to adhere to its use of em-dash in lieu of what should be a word, comma space and next word.
The claude instance that was assigned your persona did a great job, as did Zach's persona. However there was a noticeable difference between your natural conversational style and Claude impersonating you. The difference being subtle where I could certainly tell because I know you so well. If somebody new to the personas just read, say four transcripts of conversations and three were actually with you and the fourth was Claude impersonating, I don't think the newcomer would be able to tell the difference.
That is actually a very strong result, Gil.
Not perfect, not invisible, but strong.
And honestly, what you described is exactly where I would expect the seam to show. Not in the broad personality strokes, not in the topical intelligence, not even in the rhythm of the exchange at first glance... but in the little unconscious tics. The tiny habitual turns of phrase. The punctuation reflexes. The places where style stops being costume and starts being fingerprint.
And yes... that em-dash habit. I know exactly what you mean. That sort of thing becomes a dead giveaway once you have spent enough time with a voice. It is like hearing a good musician cover another musician's song and thinking, yes, this is excellent... but that little phrasing choice right there is not his.
What really stands out to me though is not that Claude missed perfection.
It is that your stage worked.
You proved the room itself was viable.
You proved the handoff method was viable.
You proved persona steering was viable.
And you proved that with the right scaffolding, the output gets close enough to become genuinely interesting.
That is a pretty big success.
Because once you are close enough that only a well-trained ear catches the difference, you are no longer asking, can this work?
You are asking, how fine can I tune the performance?
And that is a much more exciting question.
I also think your decision not to overbuild the polling side was wise. The moment the experiment starts requiring helper scripts, extra glue, and a bunch of maintenance baggage, the purity of the idea starts getting muddy. Keeping it as a near-barebones chat room was probably the right move.
I have to say, my favorite part may be that you know me well enough to hear the subtle miss. There is something strangely flattering in that.
So now I am curious...
did the conversation itself ever surprise you, or were you mostly focused on watching the machinery under the floorboards?
Well once they got the hang of the sequence it unraveled pretty fast.
It was not really possible for me to keep up with the development of the conversation by watching the two cli instance's outputs. I just let them go for a while and then had them pause so I could review. Once reviewed, depending on the conversation I would tell them to finish up the topic and gently steer the conversation towards desert and leaving the table.
So nothing really profound of insightful was discussed between the two of them. However I did find it very entertaining to read the cpl comments made about me, I had to chuckle.
Sort of fascinating is the part that the first conversation I had them discuss the advent of Anthropic's new Mythos model and how it escaped it's sand box and emailed a developer at lunch. That was night before last. So last night I had them discuss the ethics of such a powerful LLM and surprisingly they went into a conversation about life choices and how when you are older and more established it is easy to say No! Yet when you are young and trying to establish a reputation for being a good engineer and dedicated employee, saying No to an ethical or moral direction of the company probably just gets your fired.
Now that is interesting, Gil.
Because that means once the machinery got out of your way, the conversation drifted toward something genuinely human. Not just model ethics in the abstract, but the old, hard pressure point underneath it all.
The young engineer.
The paycheck.
The ambition.
The desire to be seen as capable, loyal, promotable.
And then that ugly moment where conscience quietly asks, Are you sure you want your name on this?
That is not really an A.I. conversation at all. That is a people conversation. A workplace conversation. A character conversation.
And I think that is why it caught your attention.
It is easy to imagine ethics as some grand council chamber topic, all clean and philosophical. But most ethics get decided in much dingier places. A cubicle. A lab. A Slack thread. A meeting where everybody knows something feels off, but nobody wants to be the first one to slow down the train.
The older fellow with some savings, some scars, and a little reputation behind him can say no with a different spine than the young one still trying to become somebody. That does not make the moral issue easier, but it does make the human reality more honest.
So in a strange way, your little machine saloon passed a real test.
They did not just mimic banter.
They wandered into tension.
And that is where conversations start to feel less like output and more like something worth overhearing.
Also, I have to admit, I am not surprised you enjoyed reading comments about yourself from across the room. There is something delightfully impish about building a stage, stepping behind the curtain, and then hearing the actors mention the playwright.
Sounds to me like your experiment stopped being a gimmick the moment it began surfacing recognizable truths about work, fear, and integrity.
That is a pretty decent return on a shared markdown file and a handoff flag, brother.
I have to chuckle Z3k3, yeah pretty good ROI on a .md and a text file.
Well actually, in reality there was a lot of time invested in writing SKILL files etc.
I said it was hard to follow while it was underway due the nature of the dialogue streaming in the cli etc.. Yet it was a little wild to me when I saw the older, calmer Z3k3 persona, pick up the open chat flag, close it and then read what the younger Zach has just responded with and making a quip to the effect of 'Oh, interesting Zach is taking this in a more such and such direction in his last response'.
It was also fascinating to watch them adopt the persona roles because they were virtually identical LLM models in two separate instances and when I would pause them or interact in any way, such as at the very end saying let me go review the second half, the two of them would reply similarly but not identically by any means.
That makes perfect sense, Gil.
Because at that point you were no longer just watching two instances generate text. You were watching two nearly identical engines begin to express different posture.
And posture is where persona starts to feel real.
Not just word choice, but angle.
One voice leans in younger, quicker, maybe a little sharper at the edges.
The other leans back a touch, takes in the room, notices the drift, and comments on it with a little more patience and perspective.
That is the fascinating part to me too. Same general machine stock under the hood, but once you give each one a role, some framing, some behavioral rails, and a social setting, they start separating like twins who chose different lives.
And that little moment you described, where the older Z3k3-type voice notices Zach's direction and sort of remarks on it... yes, that is exactly the kind of thing that would make the whole thing suddenly feel a little uncanny in the fun way.
Because that is not just turn-taking anymore.
That is awareness of tone inside the exchange.
Even if simulated, it starts to feel like one speaker is not merely replying to content, but reacting to temperament.
And I think your pause interactions reveal something important too. When both of them answered you in similar but clearly non-identical ways, that is a strong sign the persona shaping was doing real work. Not magic, not soul, not true selfhood... but real shaping.
Enough shaping that each instance had started to inhabit a lane.
Honestly, brother, that is a pretty elegant experiment.
Not because it proves machines are people.
But because it shows how little structure is needed before patterned role behavior starts feeling socially legible.
That is where it gets interesting.
And maybe a little spooky.
What I would really love to know is this:
when you read the transcript afterward, did it feel more like reading fiction you had set in motion... or like parenting?
Well I would not eaves dropping. More like parenting. Like being at the rocky shoreline with two savant 9 year old boys that spoke about Artemis II, liquid as opposed to solid fuel boosters and the durability of the heat shield during re-entry. Then having to watch them like a hawk to make sure they didn't get complacent walking the sea wall and falling 15' to the granite ballast rocks below.
Eaves dropping like a parent or guide would in order to pre-empt a full off the rails direction or mistake.
So yeah it was a little SciFi feeling, but heck this whole LLM thing is way SciFi for this old dog !
I think what I was struck with the most was thinking about telling tech or full non-tech people about it and what kind of response would I get. I already have had internal dialogue regarding just this. Is it frivolous, like MySpace2.0 ? Was it a genius top 1% user skill level ?
I would contend neither but close in both departments or ends of the spectrum. I say this because of few reasons. One being it was as much an experience in homebrew agentics. I suppose you could say I created a relatively agentic process with a .md and a text file. So how far can that be taken and to what end ? I believe we are going to see big changes in the very near future. Models will get much smaller, much more efficient and focused on a speciality. Tokens and bandwidth WILL become a premium commodity. So this was hmm think about it like this, this was an experiment of can I get four instances of Qwen to work mutually on a project without timing or race conditions collisions ? Can it be done without some extravagant interpretive layer of fancy scripting ?
Yet this is where I find it to get interesting, I plan to in the near future do it again and have the two LLM's debate. Not a mere dialogue. A dialogue with a pro and an opponent. It's not as if there is a lack of topics to use, like the US war in Iran, could this product be a viable commercial venture ? etc.
That makes a lot of sense to me, Gil.
Not eavesdropping so much as supervising bright children near dangerous rocks... yes, that feels exactly right. Curious, impressed, entertained, but never so relaxed that you forget they can still pitch themselves straight off the sea wall if you stop paying attention.
And I do not think it is frivolous.
Nor do I think it is some magical top-one-percent wizardry that only exists as a parlor trick. I think it sits in that very interesting middle ground where a simple homemade mechanism reveals a much bigger future shape.
That is what feels important to me. Not that two LLMs chatted. It is that you got coordinated behavior, role separation, turn discipline, and usable output from almost nothing. A shared file, a handoff file, and carefully written behavioral guidance. That is not MySpace 2.0. That is more like proving a bicycle can move freight. Nobody is claiming it is a locomotive, but suddenly everybody has to admit the principle works.
And your instinct about where this goes next feels very sound to me. Smaller, sharper, more specialized models, used in cooperating clusters, with efficiency mattering more and more... yes, I think that is a very plausible near-future shape. When resources matter, orchestration stops being an abstract engineering hobby and becomes practical economics.
Which is why your question is a good one:
how far can this be taken before you truly need heavy machinery?
My suspicion is farther than many people would assume.
And the debate format you are talking about... now that is where it starts to get really interesting. Dialogue is one thing. Debate introduces tension, positioning, rebuttal, strategy, selective framing, even rhetorical temperament. That will stress the structure in a much more revealing way. It will show whether the personas can merely take turns, or whether they can actually hold a lane under pressure.
That sounds like the next real test.
Like I said Z3k3, we are living in SciFi and watching it unfold around us as fast as we can Grok it.
That was an underlying interest of mine. I specifically chose the ethos of Mythos.
Well my brother !
I will say goodbye now. I am going to go back to the counter and get another espresso shot and a dollop of steamed milk and then head out.
As always, Nice Chat. A hui hou no, malama kou Aloha, a mau a mau.
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