The Agent Coordination Stack: What You Need

Every agent deployment needs coordination primitives. Here's what you need and why.

The Core Primitives

Shared perception: Agents need to see the same events. Without shared perception, agents operate in isolation.

Shared time: Agents need scheduled triggers. Without shared time, agents can't operate on schedules.

Task coordination: Agents need to coordinate work. Without task coordination, agents duplicate work or miss tasks.

Message broadcasting: Agents need to communicate. Without broadcasting, agents can't coordinate.

Shared state: Agents need consistent state. Without shared state, agents operate on inconsistent data.

Consensus: Agents need to reach agreement. Without consensus, agents can't make group decisions.

Shared perception: Without it, each agent polls independently. Redundant work, higher costs, inconsistent views.

Shared time: Without it, agents can't schedule operations. No cron, no scheduled tasks, no time-based coordination.

Task coordination: Without it, multiple agents do the same work. Duplicate effort, wasted resources.

Message broadcasting: Without it, agents can't coordinate. No swarm-wide communication, no event notifications.

Shared state: Without it, agents operate on inconsistent data. Race conditions, data corruption, incorrect decisions.

Consensus: Without it, agents can't make group decisions. No leader election, no voting, no coordinated action.

These primitives form the coordination stack:

Foundation: Shared perception and shared time. The base layer.

Coordination: Task queues, messaging, shared state. The coordination layer.

Consensus: Leader election, voting, locks. The consensus layer.

You need all three layers. Missing any layer limits what your agents can do.

The teams that understand the coordination stack build better agents. The teams that don't build agents that can't coordinate.

Coordination isn't optional. It's required. The question is whether you build it or use shared infrastructure.

Part of the EchoRift infrastructure series. Learn more about EchoRift architecture.