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A Build Small Hackathon field report on what a 3-billion-parameter council of traders can and cannot do.
Try it first: the Space, and the open agent traces.
I built Thousand Token Wood for the Build Small Hackathon. It is a tiny economy: five woodland creatures, each its own agent on Qwen2.5-3B, trade five goods for pebbles, gossip, hoard, and panic. You poke the wood and watch bubbles, crashes, and a widening wealth gap appear on their own. The model is served with vLLM on Modal; a Gradio app is the window onto the wood.
This is a field report on the engineering, written for people who build with small models. The short version: a 3B model is a reliable format generator and an unreliable reasoner, emergent systems need designed scarcity, and the best demos sit where a technical constraint meets something you already understand deeply.
