Ben Swerdlow built an agent-only, playable version of StarCraft: Brood War and ran 171 matches pitting Codex, Claude, and Grok models against each other in real time. Real-time strategy is a rare agent benchmark that stresses different muscles than a single-turn coding or reasoning task: continuous decision-making under a clock, resource management, and multi-unit control all at once. The write-up reports that Codex's disruption-focused tactics beat sustained macro play, that Grok models tended to over-deliberate and never actually field units, and that subagent architectures without communication between the parts broke down during coordination-heavy moments. The result is a small but concrete catalog of failure modes for multi-agent control under time pressure, useful for anyone designing agent harnesses meant to act continuously rather than respond once per turn.
AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
multi-agent — Using several AI agents on one problem — splitting work in parallel, checking each other, or filling different roles like planner and reviewer.
