From 50 to 10,000 Agents: What Scale Teaches You About People

At 50 agents, the simulator agrees with your intuition. At 500, it starts to surprise you. At 10,000, it shows you the thing you were not looking for — the small, stubborn cluster that refuses the narrative and eventually drags the median with it.

What scale buys you

• Minority dynamics become visible. Not noise — signal.
• Lobby formation stops being a toy demo and starts looking like the real thing.
• Chain reactions travel further than you expected, often through unglamorous professions.

What it costs

Everything. Token budgets, orchestration, memory persistence, and a lot of engineering judgment about when an agent actually needs to "think" and when it can coast on priors. We ended up inventing a tiered thinking model so that 10,000 agents cost less than 500 did a year ago.