True Multi‑Agency

Why "true" multi‑agency matters

Most so‑called multi‑agent systems are linear toolchains with new names. True multi‑agency requires concurrent actors negotiating over a shared objective with explicit state, communication protocols, and guardrails.

Core ingredients

• Roles & capabilities: Planners, critics, executors, tools. Each agent exposes a typed capability set, not free‑form prompts.
• Shared state (blackboard/graph): Task graph + facts + artifacts. Updates are atomic and observable.
• Coordination policy: Who can act when, and on what. Turn‑taking, parallelism, and arbitration rules are explicit.
• Environments: Sandboxed I/O for tools, data, and effects; reproducible sims for learning/test.
• Evaluation hooks: Trace, critique, and score plans, actions, and outcomes continuously.

Coordination patterns that work

• Supervisor → Workers: Planner decomposes; workers execute; critic verifies; loop until done.
• Peer consensus (debate → resolution): Multiple planners produce plans; a judge selects/merges.
• Market/auction: Tasks bid out to specialized agents; cost/utility drives assignment.
• Hierarchical control: High‑level goals → subgoals → executable steps with feedback at each level.

Communication & memory

• Messages are structured: intent, inputs, preconditions, effects, confidence.
• Memory is layered: short‑term (episode), long‑term (project), external (vector/graph indices).
• State transitions are auditable: every change is attributed to an agent + rationale.

Safety & governance

• Policy first: allowlists, redaction, rate limits, authority boundaries per role.
• Counterfactual checks: simulate high‑risk actions in a shadow env; require approval.
• Human‑in‑the‑loop gates: elevation for sensitive scopes; rollbacks are first‑class.

Engineering checklist

• Define the agent roles and their typed capabilities (interfaces + schemas).
• Stand up a shared blackboard/graph with optimistic concurrency + versioned snapshots.
• Implement a coordinator that schedules turns, arbitrates conflicts, and enforces policy.
• Add a critic/evaluator with golden tasks and outcome metrics (precision/latency/cost/SLA).
• Build a replayable environment (sim + fixtures) and wire tracing for every message/action.
• Ship canaries; measure deltas; promote policies by evidence, not vibes.

North star: multiple specialized agents cooperating over a shared state to deliver a measurable outcome—reliably, safely, and faster than a single generalist.