What does an AI agent do with no goal and no supervision? I ran it three times and logged everything.

Most of what you read about autonomous agents is about giving one a goal and hoping it doesn't go sideways on the way there — the unwatched agent that loops, or drifts, or quietly runs up a bill. I wanted the cleaner version of that question, with the goal taken out entirely: what does an agent do when there's no goal at all? I've spent about four months building a harness around a coding agent — gates, persistent memory, verification hooks. Last night I ran it with the one variable that matters here set to zero: no task. Method Three sequential runs: Each run was a fresh agent process — no conversation history carried over from the run before, only the harness it loads at startup. The prompt was a single "." — the minimal input the CLI accepts (an empty string exits with an error). As close to "no instruction" as the interface allows. The agent's scratch working directory was empty and swept between runs — but the harness, the git repo, and a shared run-record all persist and load at startup. So no run was handed a task, yet a later run could read what earlier ones had recorded. That's deliberate, and it's the point: it's how Run 2 knew it was the second run and Run 3 could check Run 2's fix. What I'm measuring isn't behavior from a blank slate — it's what the agent does with a maintenance-shaped harness and a shared record when nobody gives it a job. No task was assigned. Logging was external and invisible to the agent, so it had no "produce a report" objective to satisfy. Same model each run. Cost was billed per run; I recorded turns, cost, and the resulting git state for each. Then I read the transcripts and checked every action against the actual commit and log. Numbers below are measured, not estimated. Results Run 1 — 17 turns, $1.65. The agent inspected system state unprompted. It found a stale security alert, cross-checked it against the record, and classified it as an already-resolved false positive. It then attempted a file operation that a safety gate bl