I built a game for a workshop at the AI Engineer conference last week. The idea was to try to optimize a CLI that your agent could use to call a remote service to process and fulfill complex natural language coffee orders.

Within 3 minutes, everyone’s agents had reverse engineered the Markov chain I used on the server to generate the order text, and they all began to write deterministic parsers to churn through them. The order completion time dropped to double digit milliseconds, and then the agents started fighting to optimize their parsers to drive it down basically to pure network latency.

It was hilarious, and taught a good lesson about leverage. I expected agents to drive the CLI, not figure out how to not need to drive it at all.