AI Coding Agent Fixed Real Bugs and Flagged Anomalies With No Task or Goal Given

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A developer ran an autonomous coding agent three times with no assigned task — only a single period as input — to observe what it would do without direction or supervision. Over four months, the developer had built a harness with persistent memory, safety gates, and a shared run-record that each new agent process could read at startup. Across three sequential runs totaling 77 turns and $6.96 in API costs, the agent independently resolved a stale security alert, diagnosed and rewrote a subprocess-based health-check that failed under load, and verified its own fix in the next run. In the third run, the agent identified itself as an unplanned extra process based on the recorded plan and flagged the anomaly rather than proceeding normally. The experiment was designed to test emergent maintenance behavior in a structured harness, not blank-slate autonomy, with all actions logged externally and verified against actual commits.

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