5 LLM citizens build a small town.
Polis is an open multi-agent society simulation. Five Claude LLM roles — Mayor, Trader, Farmer, Researcher, Artist — live in a small town, make decisions, negotiate, fail, learn.
Live showcase: meetmyagent.io
Polis (Greek πόλις) is the ancient Greek word for citizen-community as a self-governing political body. To Aristotle, the polis was the natural community that exists for the good life — formed by many voices, not by a single plan. The polis was never the architecture. It was the city as a body of citizens.
That is exactly what this simulation models: not the layout of the walls, but the voices negotiating between them.
Smallville (Park et al. 2023, Stanford), Voyager (Wang et al. 2023, NVIDIA), GovSim (Piatti et al. 2024, ETH Zurich), AgentVerse (Chen et al. 2023, Tsinghua) and Project Sid (Altera 2024).
Polis runs locally, uses the Claude subscription instead of API credits, and the full source will be public here from V2.0 (planned 2026 Q3).
| Layer | Package |
|---|---|
| Multi-agent runtime | darwin-agents 0.5.0-alpha.2 |
| Graph orchestration | @langchain/langgraph 1.3 |
| Darwin/LangGraph adapter | darwin-langgraph 0.3.0-alpha.1 |
| Tracing | Langfuse + langfuse-langchain |
| LLM | Claude CLI Subscription (Sonnet 4.6) |
| Validation | Zod |
- Shared commons. Fields regenerate slowly, over-harvesting costs mood (GovSim).
- Veto democracy. Every build decision runs as a pledge, other roles can support or veto (AgentVerse).
- Skill library. The Researcher archives verified learnings, the next run starts smarter (Voyager).
- Whisper channel. Roles can speak quietly to each other without everyone reading along (Smallville).
- Inspire broadcast. The Artist nudges the global mood pool.
- Traveler. Arrives at tick 10-15 with unexpected news from outside.
- Crisis. At 50% run progress something heavy hits.
Excerpts from the first 5-tick smoke run (May 2026). Real words from the agents, not a script.
"We are not lost. We have just been united. Hope must burn." — Mayor, tick 5 ceremonial speech
"This is our founding saga. Not defeat, but the moment we showed who we really are." — Artist, tick 4
"Two fields are not enough for 8 citizens. Deficit -10 to -26 per tick. Mayor: three to four new field pledges now." — Researcher, mathematical analysis tick 2
| Version | Status | What |
|---|---|---|
| V1.0 | done | Local prototype, 5 ticks without collapse, Chronicle scored first story |
| V1.1 | done | R1+R2 agent code review GO, 15 fixes, evolution snapshot, canonical docs |
| V1.2 | done (2026-05-25) | Public mirror + coming-soon site on meetmyagent.io |
| V1.3 | done (2026-05-25) | Light theme, etymology, voices section, brand wordmark meetmyagent · polis |
| V2.0 | next | Live showcase: Phaser town, /agent drill-down, SSE stream — code drop here |
| V2.1 | planned | Run queue (max 3 parallel), run history, permalink for individual ticks |
| V3 | planned | NPCs (Architect, Designer, Travelers), AI-Town-style map |
| V4 | planned | Three.js 3D town + Temporal for multi-tick build workflows |
Polis currently lives as a prototype inside the StudioMeyer Nex-HQ monorepo. Code drop into this repo happens with V2.0. Want to see the V1 code before then? Mail matthias@studiomeyer.io.
The canonical research and architecture note lives at meetmyagent.io. A cleanly refactored variant of the V1 research report on multi-agent society patterns (Smallville/Voyager/GovSim/AgentVerse/Project Sid) will ship here with V2.0.
MIT (once V2.0 code drops). Until then: concept and roadmap free to reuse with attribution.
Built by Matthias Meyer · Studio · 2026