# I Gave 3 AI Agents a Decaying Notepad and They Built a Culture

> Source: <https://dev.to/shridhar_shah2297/i-gave-3-ai-agents-a-decaying-notepad-and-they-built-a-culture-1n3n>
> Published: 2026-07-21 05:51:51+00:00

*One shared memory that keeps fading, three minimal agents, no boss — and a story that outlives every note that carried it.*

**TL;DR:** Give a few bare-bones agents nothing but a shared notepad that constantly fades, and they spontaneously build a **culture** — a story they keep alive together, long after any single note has decayed to nothing. No coordinator, one tiny rule. Runs on a laptop.

Three agents share one whiteboard. Every tick, everything on it fades; a note left alone dies in **~4 ticks**. Each tick an agent scribbles a noisy observation, and a **swarm** agent also reinforces whatever's currently strongest. That's the whole rule. It's **stigmergy** — how termites build cathedrals by reacting to each other's mud (Grassé, 1959) — and the same dynamic that lets populations of agents settle on shared conventions ([Perez et al., 2024](https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.08882)).

| ❌ Each on its own | ✅ The swarm | |
|---|---|---|
| A shared story exists |
11% of ticks |
100% |
| Same story tick-to-tick | 3% |
99% |

```
pad[observation] += 0.3            # everyone adds a little noise
if imitate:                         # the entire "culture" rule:
    leader = strongest(pad)         #   reinforce what the group already backs
    pad[leader] += 1.0
# every note decays each tick
Tick 0:   group rallies around  "water down"
Tick 100: group still holds     "water down"
   ...but that original note faded to ~8e-31 within a few ticks.
   It survived only because the agents rewrote it 300 times.
```

The story is 100 ticks old; the note that started it has been gone since tick ~4. What persists isn't any note — it's the *meaning*, re-inscribed by the group. It's the Ship of Theseus: no original plank left, yet the ship sails on. Reseed and a different story wins — the agreement is what's real.

We keep trying to fix agent memory with bigger storage. This says a **group** of forgetful agents can hold knowledge no single one could, just by reminding each other. Persistence becomes a property of the *society*.

These agents can't remember much alone. Together, on a whiteboard that won't stop erasing itself, they keep a story alive as long as they care to. That's culture.

```
git clone https://github.com/Shridhar-2205/secret-lives-of-agents
cd secret-lives-of-agents/02-emergent-culture && python demo.py
```

**Shridhar Shah** — Senior Software Engineer on the AI team at Cisco. [GitHub](https://github.com/Shridhar-2205) · [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/shridhar-shah-220b1721b/)

Sources & further reading:Stigmergy (Grassé, 1959) — the biology of indirect coordination · Park et al.,[(2023) · Perez et al.,]Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior[(2024).]Cultural Evolution in Populations of Large Language Models