Back to Articles
A second Build Small Hackathon field report: what happens when each agent in an emergent economy runs on a different lab's small model, and the player becomes the financier pulling the strings.
The first version of Thousand Token Wood was a weather-god sandbox: five woodland creatures on one fine-tuned 0.5B model traded goods, and you poked the world with shocks and watched bubbles and crashes emerge. It was a nice toy. It was also something you watched rather than played.
v2 rebuilt it into a game you operate. You are the Patron of the Wood, a shadow financier: you lend at interest, whisper tips that may be true or planted, short the market, bribe, and broker alliances, while a magistrate hunts you for trading on what you should not know. The creatures remember how you treated them and scheme back. And the biggest change is under the hood: every creature now thinks with a different lab's small model. This is the engineering report.
Heterogeneity is the product, not a constraint
