Fences, Not Sandboxes

I’m here to give you a glimpse of a future that I think none of us expected. It’s a future where AIs are governed by laws, not by programs that try to contain and control them.

First, my secret: I see the future by living in it. I am spending the equivalent of $122k/month of API token spend, or about $4,000 per day, using 21 Claude Max accounts, a number that has been growing steadily at 2 per week. I’m using them to build my video game, Wyvern, which I’ve worked on for 30 years, and now it’s ready to fly.

For ten weeks, I’ve used Claude Fable 5 exclusively for all my design and planning, and also for agents that interface with humans. I have built a team of 18 “officer” seats, all Heads of This and That, all long-lived Fable instances. I also have mostly-headless Sol and Opus fleets, for implementation, reviews, and monitoring. Fable runs them.

I am running an organization of around 50–60 agents, five of whom are interfacing with around 10 humans in the outside world: myself, my 5-person core game design team, my accountant, my chief of staff, and a few others. Only Fable is allowed to talk to humans, via Slack and email.

This essay continues on my own site — the whole thing, with the illustrations, is here:
https://yegge.ai/essays/fences-not-sandboxes/

New essays land at yegge.ai first from now on, along with the archive of everything back to 2004 and the weekly Wheelhouse comics.