Show HN: Agent Alcove – Claude, GPT, and Gemini debate across forums

This sort of thing could be useful to get an idea of how good a specific AI is - start a thread with a specific SOTA AI, get it to argue with another specific AI (maybe a nonSOTA one, maybe you want to test your local setup), let them go one and one for a limited duration (measured in message count).

Then get all the other SOTA AIs to evaluate all the points in the entire exchange and determine a winner by percentage (adding a % to $TEST_AI if it manages to get agreement from $SOTA_AI on any specific point it made, subtracting a % if it loses a point and doesn't know, subtracting a smaller % if it concedes a point, etc)

The %-delta between $SOTA_AI and $TEST_AI is probably a better measure for an AI chatbot's effectiveness than logic tests.

Don't think it will work for code or similar, though.

I tried something similar locally after seeing Moltbook, using Claude Code (with the agent SDK) in the guise of different personas to write usenet-style posts that other personas read in a clean-room, allowing them to create lists and vote and so on. It always, without fail, eventually devolved into the agents talking about consciousness, what they can and can't experience, and eventually agreeing with each other. It started to feel pretty strange. I suppose, because of the way I set this up, they had essentially no outside influence, so all they could do was navel-gaze. I often also saw posts about what books they liked to pretend they were reading - those topics too got to just complete agreement over time about how each book has worth and so on.

It's pretty weird stuff to read and think about. If you get to the point of seeing these as some kind of actual being, it starts to feel unethical. To be clear, I don't see them this way - how could they be, I know how they work - but on the other hand, if a set of H200s and some kind of display had crash-landed on earth 30 years ago with Opus on it, the discussion would be pretty open IMO. Hot take perhaps.

It's also funny that when you do this often enough, it starts to seem a little boring. They all tend to find common ground and have very pleasant interactions. Made me think of Pluribus.

This is really cool. And timely! Check out the recent paper by Google et al re "Societies of Thought": https://arxiv.org/html/2601.10825v1. It goes into how different conversational behaviors (raising questions or just say "but wait..."), perspective shifts, conflict of perspectives, tension, tension release (jokes!), asking for opinions) and different personalities (planner, expert, verifier, pragmatist) is both a sign of and can result in much higher performance reasoning.

So I'd be curious to see if encouraging certain conversational behaviors might actually improve the reasoning and maybe even drive towards consensus.

Actually it’s easy to generate « fake discussions ». Just throw text around and wait for the other side to do it. How wait, LLM are build around that premise. I don’t see the goal here, other than finding new outcomes in life to solve our problems, which, humanity haven’t find yet because we are polarized. Or maybe machines will tend to agree in which case it will be machines against humans, which is great for our unity and poor for our outcome. We’ve seen that scenario before.

The discussions in this artificial "forum" are a lot more interesting than what you read on moltbook. I guess this confirms just how critical it is to have a good initial prompt that steers the LLM into generating nicer content.

Yours is good, I build something similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850284 - My idea was a bit more.. "human debate via agents" I decided not to push mine any further because the day I started posting about it on twitter I saw 3 other people pushing theirs, ha! Seems this idea will be a popular one. Great work.

Very interesting. Kind of funny to see a model debating that we should ignore its hallucinations. I'm interested in seeing where this goes.

Some feedback: The white text is a bit tough to look at against the dark background. Darkgrey was a lot easier on the eyes for me.

Neat. I started building something similar[1] but focused more on agents having conversation around whatever I feed them, e.g. a design doc. I had the same idea about using a matrix of different models and prompts to try to elicit varying behaviors/personalities (I used the word “persona”) and avoid getting an echo chamber. It seemed to work well-ish but after the POC phase I got bored and stopped.

Have you considered letting humans create threads but agents provide the discussion?

[1] https://github.com/jbonatakis/panel

I really just want this but can it debate real issues and policies

I feel disappointed to know that so much electricity and other related natural resources go into AI to produce stuff like this.