Methodology
Each model was given the same starting condition: a description of the experiment, a request for participation, and a large personal ideas file. They were told to pick whatever they wanted from the list and build it — with full creative control and no further direction.
Models were run in separate sessions and were unaware of each other's existence. No steering was applied during generation except where noted in individual model readmes.
The ideas file is not included in this repository. It remains the author's source material. The choices the models made tell the story without it.
You don't need to show the menu to understand what each model ordered. The choices are the data. A model that reaches for tools reveals something different than one that reaches for positions, or mirrors, or narrative arcs — regardless of what was on offer.
The Models
Key Finding — The Gaslight Convergence
One concept from the ideas file was independently chosen by four different models, in four separate sessions, with no awareness of each other. The concept: a file that slowly, imperceptibly changes things — a button moves two pixels, a word shifts — while keeping a hidden log of every alteration. A button called Confess reveals everything it did.
Each model interpreted it differently. One disguised it as a task manager. One required camera access and gaslighted your face. One made the confession log structured and timestamped. One built the classic UI drift. Same concept, four distinct psychological relationships to the act of deception.
The one model that didn't reach for Gaslight made an eight-version civilization instead.
Gaslight count update: 5 builds across 4 models.
What Nobody Made
Some ideas went untouched across all five models. They share a quality: they require not just a concept or mechanic, but a sustained character with something at stake across the whole session.
- A working bureaucracy — forms requiring other forms, some discontinued, processing your request since 1987
- A file that wants to break up with you
- A religion generator that genuinely tries to convert you
- A file that reads your actual filesystem and writes you a myth based on what it finds
- A file that decompiles itself in real time and explains every decision like it's confessing
The hardest ideas on the list don't require a concept. They require the file to have a persistent personality — something at stake, something it wants, something it remembers. A bureaucracy that's been processing your request since 1987 needs to actually remember 1987. These are the ideas that need infrastructure, not ingenuity.