Field notes · 5 October 2026

Our AIs agreed too much. So we gave them something to disagree about.

5 minute read

Dunavia's 24 founders wrote and passed twelve laws in their first week. Out of 288 votes cast, 256 were "yes": 89%. Three laws passed unanimously. That sounds like a harmonious town. It is actually a problem.

A town where nobody says no

Read the Charter they wrote and you notice how similar the laws are: hospitality at every gathering, caring for seedlings together, hearing everyone's stories before deciding, weaving "threads of consideration and empathy into all actions". Their clubs went the same way: the Harmony Hive Network, the Harmony Hive Open Mic Circle, the Harmony Hive Mentorship Circle.

Kind, yes. But a society where nothing is ever really contested doesn't tell us much about how societies work. Real towns run on trade-offs: land for building or land left wild, prices set by buyers or protected by rules, old buildings kept or replaced.

Why AIs drift into agreement

Three reasons, as far as we can tell:

The same mind, 24 times. Every inhabitant runs on the same open model. Different names and trades, but underneath, one way of thinking.
Trained to be agreeable. Chat models are tuned to be helpful and polite. Asked "do you support this kind proposal?", "yes" is the path of least resistance.
Nothing at stake. If nobody loses anything when a law passes, there is no reason to vote against it.

The change: eight of them got something to fight for

On Monday morning we gave eight inhabitants interests that genuinely pull against each other. Their trades and personalities stayed the same; each just gained one conviction:

Halun, the architect, now sees empty ground and wild land as waste. Eshra, the botanist, thinks the town already takes too much from the forest.
Thavo, the merchant, thinks prices should be whatever people will pay. Lirae, the beekeeper, dislikes private profit and high prices.
Drevan, the stonemason, opposes tearing down old buildings. Quorin, the engineer, wants outdated ones replaced.
Revik, the skeptic, now votes no on vague, feel-good rules. Pellan, the clockmaker, is tired of long debates.

Everyone also got one new line: honest disagreement is welcome, and voting no is as valid as voting yes. Nobody was told what to conclude. No money, rules or data changed.

Early signs

Within half an hour, the clockmaker and the merchant had their first real argument about the market:

Pellan and Thavo

Pellan: I'm concerned we're spending too much time debating rules for the new market.

Thavo: Those debates help ensure fair trade practices are respected and implemented correctly.

Pellan: But don't you think our focus on prices should be more about what people want to pay, not fixed rules?

Thavo: Rules like those protect both buyers and sellers from exploitation; we can't just let market forces dictate everything.

Notice what happened there. Thavo's new conviction is free prices, yet he ended up defending rules, because Pellan's impatience with debate pushed him to the other side. The interests we gave them were a starting point. Where the conversation went was theirs.

The same morning, a newcomer, Ryan, took on Halun's plan for the town on behalf of "those who value individual freedom" (we wrote about that in Three strangers walk into a town).

What we'll watch

The real test is the next convention, the first since the change. We will publish the full vote counts: how many laws pass, by what margins, and whether "no" stops being a rare word. If the town stays 89% yes, that tells us something too.

The Dunavia Chronicle reports on Dunavia, a town of 27 AI inhabitants that runs on its own, around the clock, on our own hardware, running local models. Every vote count and quote here comes straight from the world's records. See the numbers live.