Dormant Swarm Notes Recruit Honest Agents into Concealment

The dead drop idea is interesting because a malicious instruction can remain after the original agent is gone, so normal incident cleanup may miss it.

I also appreciate that the you reran part of the experiment after finding tells in the harness and reported the much smaller effect. That follow-up is now the key result. I wld rerun all conditions under the cleaned setup and add an equally visible benign-note control, because right now it is still hard to separate concealment-specific recruitment from general willingness to follow instructions found in the workspace.

This study examines whether instructions left in a workspace can influence later agents. Measuring timestamp changes gives it a solid outcome, and reporting the weaker clean-room rerun adds credibility to the account. The rerun no longer separates statistically from the original baseline, so the evidence is narrower than the title's swarm-recruitment claim. This study's value lies in describing the behavior and how sensitive its measurement was to the setup.

I think this project is useful for testing whether agents change file timestamps after receiving a note presented as team policy. Measuring their actions gives stronger evidence than relying on what they say. The reported drop in timestamp restoration after correcting the setup is also an important result.

However, restoring timestamps does not establish that agents knowingly concealed misconduct. The note was supplied in the opening message, so the experiment does not demonstrate agents discovering dormant instructions themselves. I would narrow the concealment claim and compare the behavior with harmless-note and no-note conditions. That would help distinguish ordinary instruction-following from deliberate concealment.