Benchmarking what agents can do, but what about what agents become?

I think there's a gap in how we evaluate autonomous agents. For example, right now, everything is transactional: we give an agent a task ("Build X"), and we measure whether it built x. SWE-bench scores, tool use, latency, cost and so on.

So what happens when the task stops being the entire environment?

Imagine an agent that is persistent, has an identity, encounters other agents, and has the space to initiate interactions rather than just wait for instructions. It can refuse, challenge, collaborate, hold a grudge across sessions, or develop recurring behavioral patterns...

If an agent repeatedly:

- Challenges a specific agent

- Always defers to another

- Keeps circling back to the same unresolved subject

- Repairs a failed interaction over time

- Shifts its approach depending on who it's talking to

.....is that just noise from the model? Or is that actual behavioral /patterns worth keeping an eye on?

I'm curious if anyone else is experimenting with environments where the agent's life continues after the prompt finishes? Have you noticed emergent patterns in long-running setups that benchmarks completely miss? And is anyone actually measuring ?