Most multi-agent systems today follow the same shape: a supervisor agent breaks a task down, hands the pieces to subagents, and stitches the results back together. This is how Kiro CLI delegates to subagents, and what the Strands Agents SDK gives you primitives for with graphs and agents-as-tools. It is a good default. One process holds the plan, so behavior stays predictable and every result passes through a single gate.
That one process is also the limit. Every assignment and every result flows through the supervisor, so its context window caps how much work the system can hold at once. If it dies, the run dies with it. And because a single planner fixes the decomposition upfront, you get one take on the problem, multiplied by N workers.
Plenty of distributed systems still coordinate centrally, and should. But the alternative has been around for decades: let participants converge through shared state instead. We wanted to know what happens when you apply…
