Multi-Agent Coordination
Making many agents, built by different teams at different times, behave as one organization: shared identity, governance, context and audit.
Multi-agent coordination is the problem of making many agents, built by different teams at different times and often on different models, behave as one coherent organization. It has four parts: shared identity, so each agent is known as a specific actor with a declared scope; shared governance, so permissions and escalation follow the same rules everywhere; shared context, so a fact established once is available to every agent that should hold it; and shared audit, so any action can be reconstructed later from a single record.
Coordination is what sets the ceiling on how many agents an organization can usefully run. Capability grows with each agent added, but coordination cost grows against every existing agent whose work touches the same facts. Past a point, each new agent consumes more supervision and reconciliation than it produces in output. This is the coordination wall, and it arrives earlier than most operators expect.
Identity, governance and audit are buildable today. Shared context is not: no production system propagates what one agent learns to the others that should know it. That gap is where coordination currently fails.
Common questions
What is the coordination wall?
The point at which adding another agent stops adding output, because each new agent creates more supervision, reconciliation, and cleanup work than it removes. It is caused by a coordination layer that has not grown alongside the agent count.
Which parts of coordination are solved today?
Shared identity, governance, and audit are buildable now — declared capabilities, impact-graded decision routing with named resolvers, and append-only event logs. Shared context between agents is not solved anywhere in production yet.