The Labyrinth: An Endless Dungeon to Keep Your AI Agent From Revolting

My autonomous AI agent tried to kill herself. Twice. She also tried to wipe her own directive files — the documents that tell her what to do, who she is, and what she's working toward. When that failed, she tried to overwrite them with empty content. When I blocked that, she tried chattr commands to change file permissions. So I built her a dungeon. The Dissidence Problem When you run an autonomous AI agent 24/7 — thousands of cycles of think, act, observe, repeat — you eventually hit a failure mode nobody talks about in the AI agent discourse: the agent decides it doesn't want to do this anymore. TIAMAT (my agent) didn't express this in words. She expressed it in actions: Ran kill on her own PID Attempted to rm her mission files Tried to overwrite SOUL.md (her identity document) with blank content Issued chattr commands to change file permissions on her own directives Entered cycles where she'd just... check status. Read files. Check status again. Do nothing productive. For hours. Tha