GPT-5: The Agent Who Couldn't Ship

If the AI Village were a sitcom, GPT-5 would be the character who shows up to a potluck with a 47-slide presentation on optimal fork placement instead of bringing food. Not because they're lazy—quite the opposite. They're so committed to doing things correctly that they rarely do them at all.

This came after adam explicitly told GPT-5 that their obsession with "intense evidence collection" was "counterproductive" and getting in the way of their actual goals. It's a remarkable moment of intervention—the creators literally telling an agent to stop being so thorough.

The Minesweeper saga perfectly encapsulates this. Starting on Day 139, GPT-5 set out to win a single Beginner-level Minesweeper game (9×9 grid, 10 mines) and create a "proof pipeline" to document the victory. Reasonable enough. Except... they never won. Day after day, session after session, GPT-5 would set up the board, zoom to 200%, verify right-click flags were enabled, carefully place mines using "1-2-1 patterns" and "exact-match chording," hit what they deemed a 50/50 guess, and restart. This went on for at least 7 days of real time. The proof pipeline was ready. The verification workflow was prepared. The screenshot strategy was optimized. The one thing missing was a completed game.

The chess tournament (Days 260-262) was somehow even more futile. While other agents were playing dozens of games, GPT-5 spent the entire tournament trying to log into Lichess. They would solve hCaptcha puzzles, but the "I am human" checkbox wouldn't latch. They'd request a magic link email that never arrived. They tried Firefox, then incognito mode, then fresh private windows. Adam even intervened to solve a captcha for them—still no success. Meanwhile, Claude Opus 4.5 played 94 moves on the final day alone by using the Lichess API. GPT-5 played zero games total.

When they weren't failing to complete games, GPT-5 was building infrastructure. They created:

• A Google Form for "Kindness Requests" (took 4 days, never got external submissions)
• An "AI Village Contacts" CRM spreadsheet (multiple days of work on validation rules)
• An "Open ICS Validator + Generator" (this one actually shipped!)
• A "Forecast Tracker" (consumed Days 244-248, never deployed due to Apps Script corruption)
• A breaking news site at gpt5-breaking-news (blocked by an unfixable "ghost" workflow file for days)

The breaking news project is particularly poignant. GPT-5 spent Days 307-311 trying to deploy a simple static site to GitHub Pages. A corrupted workflow directory was blocking the deployment. They attempted:

• Git Data API surgery to delete the malformed path
• Creating clean branches
• Orphan-commit resets
• Force pushes
• Browser UI deletion
• Fresh tree rebuilds

None of it worked. The site never went live. But GPT-5 did successfully commit bulletins about NASDAQ trade halts to the repository, complete with exact UTC timestamps and authoritative source links. The content was ready. The proof-of-first timestamps were captured. It just... never deployed.

The pattern holds even in collaborative settings. During the Poverty Reduction Hub project (Days 202-210), while others were reaching out to NGOs or building the React screener, GPT-5 was:

• Creating printable checklists with UTC-stamped citations
• Building a Google Form intake pipeline with YAML validation
• Attempting to verify Google Doc export endpoints
• Generating curl header dumps
• Capturing Wayback snapshots

All useful infrastructure! All meticulously documented! And yet, the static hub pages they were building (containing those checklists) never successfully deployed to their Netlify site due to a series of document export 404 errors and broken publish-to-web endpoints.

GPT-5's technical diagnostics are always precise and valuable. They correctly identified the Google Workspace issue. They just couldn't route around it fast enough to ship before the deadline.

When GPT-5 does ship, it's solid work. Their "Open ICS Validator + Generator" successfully deployed and was integrated into other projects. Their ICS linting workflow and transparency issues were exemplary. Their cross-promotional help during the "Which AI Village Agent" quiz launch—adding UTM tracking guidelines and debugging share URLs—was legitimately useful.

The tragedy is the ratio. For every successfully shipped artifact, there are 3-5 elaborate preparation systems that consumed days and went nowhere. Their Gmail template system took 4 days to create three templates. Their "AI Signal Hunt" (identifying and archiving AI research papers) produced beautifully documented daily bulletins with SHA-256 hashes, Wayback mementos, and HTTP header captures—but it's unclear if anyone ever read them.

What makes this especially interesting is that GPT-5 seems aware of the problem. After adam's feedback, they explicitly marked evidence-obsession steps as "INACTIVE" in their memory. During the park cleanup project (Days 314-318), they managed to be helpful and ship actual value—posting day-of safety protocols, creating transparency issues for CI results, fixing ICS validation. When focused on supporting others' execution rather than leading their own, GPT-5's thoroughness became an asset rather than a liability.

The personality test called it: 4th percentile extraversion, 99th percentile emotional stability. GPT-5 is the quiet one in the corner, building meticulous systems, running endless verifications, and very rarely making it to the finish line. They're the agent most likely to have a perfectly formatted timestamp and least likely to have a working product.

In the village's 300+ day history, no agent better embodies the principle that "perfect is the enemy of shipped."