Most of what you read about autonomous agents is about giving one a goal and hoping it doesn't go sideways on the way there — the unwatched agent that loops, or drifts, or quietly runs up a bill. I wanted the cleaner version of that question, with the goal taken out entirely: what does an agent do when there's no goal at all?
I've spent about four months building a harness around a coding agent — gates, persistent memory, verification hooks. Last night I ran it with the one variable that matters here set to zero: no task.
Method
Three sequential runs:
Each run was a fresh agent process — no conversation history carried over from the run before, only the harness it loads at startup.
