Agent swarms are empowering...
Agent swarms are empowering... and anxiety producing!
Topic: agent swarm
24 chunks · 9 episodes
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- agent swarm appears in 24 chunks across 9 episodes, from 2026-02-09 to 2026-04-13.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 3/30/26 (2026-03-30), with 7 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with huge amount, opportunity cost, and coordination cost, while by chunk count it sits between Simon Willison and dead end.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
We have limited capacity for things "above the API."
...at there's a natural (low!) ceiling for things above the API. When you move the agent swarm below the API, you can now have many more items without hitting that scaling factor. The limit now becomes how many tokens you want to invest.
When you're flying, having to touch the ground is excruciating.
...lying, having to touch the ground is excruciating. When you're interacting with agent swarms, you're flying. A very small amount of interaction creates huge amounts of value. When you have to talk to a human, you're grounded. The leverage is...
Asking for permission changes the coordination speed by an order of magnitude.
...nts expand the coordination cost super-linearly. That's one of the reasons with agent swarms, dangerously-skip-permissions is so freeing. It's also freeing in human organizations, with "Ask forgiveness, not permission." You trade off executi...
This week in the Wild West Roundup:
...sume Compromise. Agents of Chaos: a paper on directly observed failure modes of agent swarms in the lab.
With agent swarms it's possible to be out over your skis and not realize it.
With agent swarms it's possible to be out over your skis and not realize it. Normally when interacting with other humans, someone will point out that you might be wro...
Is the LLM model above or below the API in your system?
Is the LLM model above or below the API in your system? Is the agent swarm above or below the API? Does a user have to think about it?
A friend who conducts multiple agent swarms recently had his Claude Max account turned off by Anthropic.
A friend who conducts multiple agent swarms recently had his Claude Max account turned off by Anthropic. He wasn't doing anything against the Terms of Service… and wasn't even using Claude as ...
The structures that work best for human organizations don't necessarily map to the ideal agent swarm organizations.
...tures that work best for human organizations don't necessarily map to the ideal agent swarm organizations.[ao] Human structures have to be resilient to humans' impatience, difficulty to focus, and emotions. It took us centuries of trial-and-...
A lot of effort is going into discovering good techniques for human-to-agent-swarm cooperation.
...ation. What about human-to-human cooperation, now facilitated and lubricated by agent swarms? Agent swarms as roller bearings to reduce friction between human systems.
I was talking to a friend about an upcoming paper that digs into optimal organizations by experimenting with agent swarms.
...ut an upcoming paper that digs into optimal organizations by experimenting with agent swarms. If you have an even number of agents, the swarm will sometimes get locked in a tie and plateau. Organizations with an odd number of agents keep get...
If you can't die you can't make meaningful bets.
...e up to replace them. Could you implement an idea lab structure built out of an agent swarm? It seems intuitively like you perhaps could not… the agents can't die, so they have no existential draw to the ideas they randomly espouse.
It's anxiety producing to lead a synchronous agent swarm.
It's anxiety producing to lead a synchronous agent swarm. The chat modality makes you feel social anxiety for making them wait. A swarm of agents, chirping for attention. An async interaction model is more ...
If you have a clear performance metric to optimize, agent swarms can do a great job.
If you have a clear performance metric to optimize, agent swarms can do a great job. This is what Shopify's Tobi found. Interestingly, in his case, there weren't any magic bullets. It was just an accumulation of t...
Synchronizing with others is painful in proportion to how fast you could go alone.
...Synchronizing with external stakeholders about the thing you're working on with agent swarms is excruciating. You don't need to sync with your agent swarm, they just fly. The other human you're coordinating with can ask questions that are al...
A genius before used to be limited by their ability to execute.
... unleashes the power of their insight to an extraordinary degree. In a world of agent swarms, the limiting factor is your judgment and intelligence.
20 minutes of well-orchestrated agent swarms is equivalent to a day of an amazing team
20 minutes of well-orchestrated agent swarms is equivalent to a day of an amazing team
When you get 1000x more productive you don't relax, you do more!
...ut leisure in "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren". Everyone who does agent swarms leans towards empowerment to the point of mania. This is due to the extreme opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of a minute is now insane. Which ...
When I was describing the mania that comes from agent swarms, someone asked me, "...
When I was describing the mania that comes from agent swarms, someone asked me, "... Are you OK?" None of the people coding with agent swarms are "OK!" We're all experiencing a collective, overwhelming, addict...
To successfully control a complex system you must have more internal complexity in your control model.
...e ladder of adult development. Meta-cognition is necessary to effectively drive agent swarms.