mfowler
11843f41a4
A sketch backlog of further examples, each teaching a distinct orchestration topology (anthill/stigmergy, kitchen line/pipeline, incident room/blackboard, senate/debate, baton/mutex+failover, immune system/reactive, evolution chamber, plus ATC and day-night extras). Not implemented — ideas only. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
94 lines
4.9 KiB
Markdown
94 lines
4.9 KiB
Markdown
# Example ideas — creative multi-agent topologies
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A backlog of *example* projects for `examples/`, each chosen to teach a **different orchestration
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topology** on the same harness. Nothing here is implemented yet — these are sketches.
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Built so far:
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- **`builder-adversary/`** — a **phase machine**: an ordered plan, two roles (Builder + Adversary)
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handing off via `claim(`/`review(` commits. (The cc-ci pattern.)
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- **`snakepit/`** — a **worker pool over a pull-queue**: identical worker "snakes" claim tasks from
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a shared filesystem pit by atomic `mv`, plus planner + cleanup specialist species.
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Each idea below lists: the metaphor, the topology it teaches, the star harness primitive, and what
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makes it distinct from what we already have.
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---
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## Strong candidates
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### 🐜 Anthill (stigmergy)
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Ants coordinate with *no direct messaging*: they lay pheromone trails, others follow the strong
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ones, and trails **evaporate** over time. Agents drop weighted "trail" files toward promising
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solutions/paths; a `[[service]]` slowly decays them.
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- **Teaches:** indirect coordination through a decaying shared environment (opposite of snakepit's
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explicit claim).
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- **Star primitive:** a background **service** as the evaporation clock; emergent routing with zero
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agent-to-agent chat.
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### 🍳 The Line (kitchen brigade)
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A restaurant pass: prep → sauté → plating → **expo**. A ticket (order) flows station to station; the
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expo bounces a bad plate back down the line. Many tickets in flight at once.
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- **Teaches:** a true multi-stage **pipeline** (>2 roles) with backpressure / rework — distinct from
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builder-adversary's two roles over a whole-task phase.
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- **Star primitive:** chained `handoff` inboxes + per-station commit prefixes (`fire(`, `plate(`,
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`expo(`).
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### 🕵️ The Incident Room (blackboard)
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A corkboard of pinned facts and red string. Specialist detectives (forensics, alibi, motive,
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witnesses) each watch the board and pin a new deduction *only when their preconditions appear*; a
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lead declares the case closed.
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- **Teaches:** opportunistic, **data-driven activation** — agents fire when the shared state makes
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them relevant, not on a schedule.
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- **Star primitive:** a shared blackboard file + watchdog pings on board changes; no fixed order.
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### ⚖️ The Senate (debate panel)
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N agents argue a question from assigned stances; a moderator synthesizes; rounds repeat until
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consensus or a vote.
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- **Teaches:** structured **multi-round deliberation** with diverse "minds."
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- **Star primitive:** the **phase machine** where each phase = one debate round, plus **per-phase
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model overrides** to give each seat a genuinely different model; `on_complete` writes the verdict.
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### 🏃 The Baton (relay / token ring)
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Exactly one runner holds the baton (a lock file) and works; passes it on completion. Drop the baton
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(crash) and the next runner picks it up.
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- **Teaches:** **mutual exclusion + failover** — enforced serialization, the mirror image of the
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snakepit's parallelism.
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- **Star primitive:** `watch = "heal"` + the watchdog reaping a dead holder so the baton never gets
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stuck.
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### 🦠 The Immune System (detect → respond)
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Sentinels patrol logs/metrics/files for anomalies (pathogens); on a hit they raise an antigen (alert
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file); responder "macrophages" swarm that specific threat; memory cells record signatures so repeats
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resolve faster.
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- **Teaches:** an **event-driven monitoring/reactive** topology with escalation.
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- **Star primitive:** a watcher **service** emitting alerts + reactive agents woken by inbox pings.
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- **Bonus:** genuinely *useful* — a self-healing "watch my repo/CI" tool wearing a fun costume.
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### 🧬 The Evolution Chamber (genetic algorithm)
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A population of candidate solutions; breeder agents mutate/crossbreed; a selector culls by fitness;
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generations advance until fitness plateaus.
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- **Teaches:** **population-based iterative search** with a fitness gate.
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- **Star primitive:** phase machine where each phase = one generation; `done_marker` trips when
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fitness stops improving.
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---
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## Quick extras (less fleshed out)
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- **🗼 Air Traffic Control** — many workers contend for *one* scarce runway (a single deploy/build
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slot); a controller grants timed landing slots. Teaches centralized **scarce-resource
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arbitration** (snakepit has plentiful work; here the *resource* is the bottleneck).
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- **🌙 Day/Night (sleep consolidation)** — workers act by day; a "sleep" agent on a `wake` timer
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consolidates the day's artifacts into long-term memory each night. Teaches **scheduled batch
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consolidation** (the "memory builder / coprophagy" idea as its own example).
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---
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## Suggested next trio
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If picking three that cover the most new ground: **The Line** (pipeline), **The Incident Room**
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(blackboard), and **The Immune System** (reactive monitoring — and actually useful).
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Each should follow the snakepit shape: a README with the metaphor→compute mapping, an `agents.toml`,
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role prompts, and a tiny runnable task.
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