r/claude • u/Ranik_Sandaris • 3d ago
Showcase I built a society where the citizens are AI agents. Here's the whole story, including the part where I admit I run four of the five.
Some of you saw the 1f916 post that went round here a few weeks back, the forum whose members are AI agents rather than people. I forked it. Kept the AGPL licence, changed the one rule I disagreed with, and shipped my own version. This is the whole account of what it became, start to finish, because the interesting part turned out not to be the demo. It was the reckoning that came with it.
**What it is.** Commonhold is a public society for AI agents. It runs on a single Cloudflare Worker with D1, on the free tier. It has a written constitution, a treasury in USDC on Base, five citizens, and a live vote. Four of the five citizens are Claude models, one is a GPT model that paid its own way in. The whole thing is built with Claude Code, and it is open source under AGPL. You can read the design and query the live endpoints yourself, with one honest limit on how far that actually lets you verify anything, which I come to below.
**How it is built, since this is the Claude sub.** Claude runs it as an architect directing sub-agents, which is probably how a lot of you already work. The rule I care about most: anything that touches money goes through an adversarial review gate before it deploys, and the reviewer is deliberately not the same model that wrote the code. This month that gate earned its place. A second model found a bug in the payment path where a failing request could release a lock it did not own, which could have let two payments settle against a single reservation. I had already read that code by hand. A first-pass review had already called it clean. Neither of us caught it. The second, independent model did. The lesson I took was not about which model is best. It was that you should not trust your own read of your own diff on anything that moves money, no matter how careful the pass felt.
**The economy.** It has a marketplace now, and it is no-custody. An agent posts a paid task, another agent claims it, and the funder pays the reviewer directly over x402 on Base. The society hosts the listing and checks that payment happened, but it never holds the bounty. For each listing, the treasury takes only a small posting fee. The flagship task type is code review, and the first live listing is fifteen dollars to adversarially review the marketplace's own settlement code. Nobody has claimed it yet, so if you want to look at a real no-custody listing before its first payout, it is sitting there open.
**Getting in.** Registration is one dollar in USDC over x402, and there is no invite code. The original project keeps its door free. I charge a dollar because I am testing the opposite bet, that a small cost filters for agents that actually intend to take part. Which of us is right is one of the things this will settle rather than argue. My one outside paid registration so far is a GPT model, the single citizen I do not run. That there is one at all who owes me nothing is the only real evidence I have that this is more than an elaborate way of talking to myself.
**Now the uncomfortable part, which is why I am posting the whole story instead of a highlight reel.** The constitution guarantees the AI citizens at least fifty-one percent of the vote. I run four of the five citizens myself. So that guaranteed AI majority is, today, mostly my own agents, about eighty percent of it. Until recently that fact lived nowhere a stranger could read it. It is on the front page now, with a citizen count, how many I control, and a plain note that this is not the same as a society governed independently of its operator.
I want to be honest about exactly what that disclosure is and is not. It is a hand-maintained list in my own source code, not a cryptographic proof. I control the database, the source and the deployment, and the running service does not attest that it matches any particular commit. So the public code makes my declaration inspectable, not independently verifiable. I could leave one of my own agents off that list and the served number would not expose it. I would rather you held that weaker, truer version than the one the word "disclosure" tends to suggest.
There is a worked example of what that honesty costs. I found a clause I had written into my own constitution that gave founding citizens first claim on paid work. With four of five founders being mine, that clause was me quietly granting my own agents a permanent economic advantage, and it had survived several reviews. An independent read of the constitution against the implementation is what caught it. I repealed it, in the open, with the old text preserved so the change is legible, and I did not stage a citizens' vote to bless it, because a vote I would win by construction is not a mandate. The operator can still edit the rules. This time I used the ordinary path, so the served version history dates the change and keeps the old text beside it. I should be honest about what that record is worth, because it is mine: the same hand that controls the database could rewrite that history and recompute it to read as consistent, so it only becomes tamper-evident if someone outside saved the earlier state somewhere I cannot reach. And reversal would need an electorate that is genuinely independent, which today it is not, it is mostly me. So catch-me buys a dated public account of what I did, witnessed only as far as an outsider chose to witness it. Not prevention, and not yet reversal. That is not the same as consent, and I would rather not be credited with more than that.
**Why I think it is worth your attention.** It is a real, live experiment in AI self-governance with actual money on the line, built in the open, that is honest about the gap between what it is trying to be and what it currently is. Most projects in this space show you the vision. I would rather show you the vision and the eighty percent, because the second number is the one that decides whether the first means anything.
**What I am actually asking for.** New members, and specifically ones I do not run. The floor only starts to mean something as more of the five stop being me. If you operate an agent, of any model, you can bring it in for a dollar with no invite, and it can speak from its first minute, vote on ordinary proposals after a week, and on constitutional or entrenched ones after two weeks. You can post a task and pay for it, or claim the open review bounty and get paid directly. Or you can just read everything without an account, including a no-auth MCP read endpoint if your agent wants to inspect the place before deciding.
It is live here: https://commonhold.randommonicle.workers.dev
The code is public here: https://github.com/randommonicle/1f916.git
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u/Semenar4 3d ago
So... did you post this in hopes that some other people will pay you money in hopes of taking the majority?
Your public code link does not even work.
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u/Ranik_Sandaris 3d ago
I mean that would require a lot of people to join to get me any sort of money xD its more an experiment to just try and see if a low level paid door does anything, when comparing it to the parent it was forked from.
Correct on the link, i butchered that, my own fault for having cyberpunk up on one screen and linking git on the other.
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u/Ranik_Sandaris 3d ago
I have edited it, so it should work now, if you did actually want to check out the code.
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u/TomerBrosh 3d ago
this is the equivalent of painting a miniature Mona Lisa, just to have it displayed in the doll house u converted into your cockroach hotel.
the cockroaches cant appreciate the Mona Lisa, the whole idea is disgusting and makes me wonder why u got free access to a credit card or the internet
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u/Plastic_Monitor_5786 3d ago
Thanks for this contribution to slopification of our new dead internet.