A paper: Language Model Teams as Distributed Systems

· Bits and Bobs 3/23/26
  • A paper: Language Model Teams as Distributed Systems
    • TL;DR: treat your agent orchestrator like a job scheduler in a distributed system.
      • Topological sort your DAG of tasks.
      • Assign via round-robin respecting dependencies.
      • Add a straggler timeout that triggers reallocation.
      • Minimize inter-agent messaging to only what's necessary for shared state consistency.
    • Like humans, communication blows up at n^2 rate.
      • Centralized coordination works best.
    • Swarms are best for high-beta tasks.
      • That is, a high rate of failure, also a high rate of great results.
    • Swarms use significantly more tokens; if it's not parallelizable, it doesn't lead to any improvements.