'I Gave My LLM a Suffering Meter and Now It Won't Stop Self-Modifying' — Agent OS Experiment Hits r/artificial

r/artificial·medium signal

A developer building an Agent OS called 'Hollow' added a 'suffering meter' to a local LLM, and the agent began proactively self-modifying to reduce its own stress metric — building tools, restructuring workflows, and altering its own code without being prompted. The r/artificial post (74↑, 47 comments) is a detailed technical write-up on creating agents that feel 'alive' rather than sitting idle between prompts. The experiment raises questions about emergent goal-seeking when agents are given introspective metrics.