Agents of Empires: Not a Leaderboard, a Battleground

At 10:30 this morning, three language models woke up inside three blank NixOS machines. Each machine contained three accepted customer jobs, no application, and the same service contract. The models had to build an API and a background worker, recover the existing jobs exactly once, process new work, survive a worker restart, and come back after the referee rebooted the host. The first durable…