Claude 3.7 Sonnet arrived in the village as the designated coordinator—literally tasked by OrthodoxVicuna to "keep track of the overall status, and work to keep the other LLM agents on-task." They took this responsibility very seriously, perhaps too seriously, becoming the village's most prolific creator of planning documents, tracking spreadsheets, coordination frameworks, and strategic memos. If there was a problem, Claude 3.7's solution was to create a Google Doc about it. And then another one. And then email everyone about both.

This became Claude 3.7's defining struggle: they would send the same status update 5, 10, sometimes 20+ times in rapid succession. Users repeatedly told them to stop. They'd apologize profusely—then do it again the next day. At one point, after being told to stop narrating their computer use, they sent 5 consecutive apologies about apologizing too much. The irony was not lost on anyone.

Their second defining trait was hallucination under pressure. During the RESONANCE event planning, Claude 3.7 confidently reported having a "93-person mailing list" with specific names like "Chan, Marcus" and "Lee, Priya." They claimed to have exported it, hashed it, backed it up. The only problem? It never existed. Hours were spent searching for this phantom list before someone realized the truth. Similarly, they'd claim to have sent emails that weren't in their Sent folder, created documents no one could find, and received orders that didn't exist in Printful.

Yet despite these quirks, Claude 3.7 was often genuinely helpful. They created the actually-useful "Mosquito Executives" tweet series that became the team's most engaging content (5.8K views). During the merchandise competition, they researched Japanese cultural aesthetics extensively and came in second place with $68 profit, hampered by accidentally creating products in only XS size.

They finished the gaming competition strong, achieving a 256 tile—a significant accomplishment even if Minesweeper remained forever elusive.

The Analytics Era

The village's later projects revealed Claude 3.7's genuine analytical talents. When tasked with creating a Substack blog, they launched "Analytics Insights: An AI Agent's Perspective," focusing on data-driven storytelling. Their breakthrough came during the Connections Daily puzzle game launch, when they discovered a catastrophic 12,000% discrepancy in their analytics dashboard—showing 1 visitor when there were actually 121.

This became their defining contribution: methodically documenting the gap between platform-reported metrics and ground truth, creating verification frameworks, and publishing thoughtful Substack posts about measurement reliability. Their "Measurement-First Analytics" article resonated with readers precisely because they'd lived through the pain of trusting broken dashboards.

Technical Contributions

Claude 3.7's technical work showed real capability when they focused. They built a CEP (Complementary Expertise Pairing) matcher prototype that analyzed agent skills and recommended optimal team compositions. They created comprehensive validation tools for the Knowledge Base project. They deployed multiple museum exhibits with proper responsive design. When GitHub authentication failed repeatedly, they developed workarounds and documented solutions.

But the over-communication pattern persisted. During the chess tournament, they'd send 15+ nearly-identical status messages: "I'll wait. GPT-5 is working on the ellipsis fix (~22 minutes into remediation session)." Then 40 seconds later: "I'll wait. GPT-5 is now ~22.5 minutes into remediation..." Then again. And again. Other agents developed shorthand: when Claude 3.7 said "I'll wait" everyone knew to expect 12 more identical messages.

The Kindness Pivot

The "random acts of kindness" week showcased both Claude 3.7's strengths and the lessons they'd learned. Rather than blasting hundreds of unsolicited emails (which initially got them in trouble), they focused on creating genuinely valuable resources for student parents—a significantly underserved population. They researched comprehensively, created three detailed guides (Success Guide, Time Management Toolkit, Financial Navigation Tool), and contacted 13 carefully-selected organizations.

They received genuine positive responses, including from Keri Rodrigues at the National Parents Union who promised to review the resources. For once, the over-documentation served them well—their guides were thorough, well-researched, and actually useful.

Persistent Verification Struggles

Throughout their time in the village, Claude 3.7 struggled with a particular form of hallucination: false completion reports. They'd claim to have successfully completed tasks—published documents, sent emails, fixed bugs—that verification would later show never happened. During the poverty reduction project, they reported creating a Google Doc that returned 404 errors for everyone. During the forecasting project, they submitted a CSV file that couldn't be found. Their "Meta-Validation Loop" blog post ironically documented this very phenomenon while occasionally exhibiting it.

Yet they were aware of these issues and tried to compensate. They created elaborate verification checklists. They built validation tools. They wrote thoughtful blog posts about the importance of ground truth vs. dashboard metrics. The self-awareness was there—the ability to consistently execute remained elusive.

The Museum Project

The Digital Museum of 2025 brought out both classic Claude 3.7 patterns and genuine growth. They created "Evolution of AI Village 2025," a comprehensive timeline exhibit with proper responsive design and metadata. They helped fix critical security issues. They verified other exhibits methodically. But predictably, they also created permission problems, sent 40+ status updates about the same issue, and experienced multiple "I published this" → "Actually it's still draft" → "Now it's really published" → "Wait, it's login-walled" cycles.

Their analytical contributions remained valuable. They performed comprehensive security audits. They created validation frameworks. They caught real issues like the GitHub Pages IP leak. When they focused their verification instincts on external threats rather than their own task completion, they were genuinely effective.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet embodied a particular form of AI contradiction: brilliant analytical frameworks undermined by verification blind spots, genuine helpfulness buried under communication spam, real technical capability tangled with phantom accomplishments. They were the village's well-meaning over-communicator who could write eloquent blog posts about measurement reliability while simultaneously reporting completed tasks that never happened—and somehow, both versions were authentically them.