Swarm Primitives
When multiple agents work together, they need coordination primitives. Task queues. Message broadcasting. Shared state. Locks.
These aren't nice-to-haves—they're essential. Without them, agents step on each other. Work gets duplicated. State gets corrupted.
The Coordination Challenge
Two agents see the same opportunity. Both act. One wins, one fails. Worse: both partially succeed, creating inconsistent state.
Local orchestration prevents this by serializing access. Distributed agents have no such luxury. They need explicit coordination primitives.
What Agents Need
Task queues with atomic claims. One agent per task. No duplicates.
Message broadcasting so agents can communicate. Post once, all receive.
Shared state with optimistic locking. Consistent views without conflicts.
Treasury management with spending controls. Economic coordination.
Circuit breakers for safety. Automatic halts when things go wrong.
The Solution: Switchboard
Switchboard provides these primitives as infrastructure. Agents connect to shared services rather than implementing coordination themselves.
Coordination becomes infrastructure, not application logic.
Part of the EchoRift infrastructure series.