In most of my multi-agent workflows, I always end up asking them to create a group-chat system to coordinate and post updates. I thought this was such an obvious day-0 discovery that I assumed it's a well known and understood pattern that wasn't worth talking about. I once again discover that what I take for obvious and granted, might not be.

I've found that similarly to how teams can degrade into spending more time bikeshedding and on the watercooler than on work, agents also tend to end up spending way too much time coordinating as opposed to doing the work. And so I rediscovered that it's better to have one agent that's the Manager (on a Manager Schedule) and the rests be builders (on a Builder's Schedule), where the manager might be interrupt driven, but the builders need to be able to focus for a while without interruption (context poisoning).

Thanks for writing this and demonstrating that writing about anything is useful to share knowledge and practices. In the end, I learned a lot from Martin Fowler and his gang and I guess I should pay back and write about my own discoveries, however trivial they seem to me.