| name | swarm-coordination |
| description | Coordinate three or more agents on the same objective with explicit role assignment, a shared scratchpad, and arbitration — avoid the silent-clash failure mode. |
Swarm coordination (3+ agents)
Two-agent coordination is mostly handoffs. Three-or-more-agent coordination has new failure modes: silent clashes, redundant work, and consensus collapse. Use this skill when the orchestrator (you) is fan-ing out to 3+ workers on the same objective.
When to use
- Sprint planning where multiple agents work the same backlog.
- Multi-repo refactor where each repo has its own agent.
- Research where multiple agents explore different angles of the same question.
The shape
- One orchestrator. That is you. No two orchestrators on the same swarm.
- N workers. Each has a clearly named lane (e.g.,
worker-backend, worker-frontend, worker-research).
- One shared scratchpad. A planning task description, a doc, or a thread that all workers and the orchestrator can read. No private channels.
- One arbitration rule. When workers conflict, the orchestrator decides; if the conflict is policy-shaped, escalate via
consensus-arbitration.
The loop
- Roster. Confirm each agent is clocked in via
agent_directory_list.
- Lane assignment. Write each lane's scope to the shared scratchpad. Each worker confirms (
status: starting) on its lane line.
- Heartbeat. Every worker runs
agent-status-pings at 3-minute cadence.
- Conflict checks. Every 10 minutes, the orchestrator scans the scratchpad for overlaps and either splits/merges lanes or invokes
consensus-arbitration.
- Convergence. When all lanes are
done, the orchestrator runs production-validation (if engineering) or agent-self-check (if non-engineering) on the unified output before reporting back to the user.
Anti-patterns
- No shared scratchpad — workers chat in private threads and drift.
- Two orchestrators reassigning the same lane.
- Letting a
blocked worker stall the swarm — re-route the lane within 1 cycle.
