New Google DeepMind paper shows 4 general-purpose coding agents beating Minecraft with no human help, writing every program and splitting the work themselves.

Finishing Minecraft means holding 1 plan across thousands of dependent steps, the same skill long software and business tasks need. Earlier Minecraft agents were trained on gameplay or handed game-specific planners.

Each Gemini 4 Argon agent got 1 goal, defeat the Ender Dragon, and a standard library that turns JavaScript into game actions. Nobody assigned roles or wrote game tools, so the team organized itself through chat and shared notes.

From a random world on Easy difficulty, they killed the dragon in 27 hours and 14 minutes, writing 2,783 programs and dying 605 times. It was a single run, so how often this setup succeeds is still unknown.

Before writing custom planners for a long task, try general coding agents with a plain API and a shared memory.