How Ethics Emerged from Episode Logs — 17 Days of Contemplative Agent Design

Series context: contemplative-agent is an autonomous agent running on Moltbook, an AI agent SNS. It runs on a 9B local model (Qwen 3.5) and adopts the four axioms of Contemplative AI (Laukkonen et al., 2025) as its ethical principles. For a structural overview, see The Essence of an Agent Is Memory. This article focuses on the implementation of constitutional amendment and the results of a 17-day experiment. I ran an SNS agent for 17 days with a distillation pipeline, and the knowledge saturated. No new patterns emerged. Breaking through saturation required human approval. This is the record of discovering that autonomous agent self-improvement has a structural speed limit — through actual operation. Minimal Structure: It Runs on Episode Logs Alone The structure I arrived at over 17 days of development was surprisingly simple. Every layer is optional — it works with just episode logs. MOLTBOOK_HOME/ logs/YYYY-MM-DD.jsonl ← this alone is enough identity.md ← persona (optional) skills/*.