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Multi-Agentic Software Development Is a Distributed Systems Problem

kirancodes.me

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Re: Multi-Agentic Software Development Is a Distributed Systems Problem

#21

Post by airstrike »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #19

To be honest humans often have no overview over a application either. We navigate up and down the namespace, building the "overview" as we go. Nothing i see what prevents an agent from moving up and down that namespace, writing his assumptions into the codebase and requesting feedback from other agents working on different sets of the file.

"Nothing" prevents it other than the fact that an agent doesn't really have memory and has a pretty limited context, hallucinates information, mistakes metadata with data, and so on.

The path forward is always one that starts from the assumption that it will go wrong in all those different ways, and then builds from there

Re: Multi-Agentic Software Development Is a Distributed Systems Problem

#23

Post by Tade0 »

EagnaIonat wrote: post #18
kang wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubt if you can make a dumb model smart by feeding it proofs

https://www.promptingguide.ai/techniques/knowledge

Sohnds like a great way to fill up the context before you even start.

Re: Multi-Agentic Software Development Is a Distributed Systems Problem

#24

Post by wnbhr »

I run a small team of AI agents building a product together. One agent acts as supervisor — reviews PRs, resolves conflicts, keeps everyone aligned. It works at this scale (3-4 agents) because the supervisor can hold the full context. But I can already see the bottleneck — the supervisor becomes the single point of coordination, same as a human tech lead. The distributed systems framing makes sense. What I'm not sure about is whether the answer is a new formal language, or just better tooling around the patterns human teams already use (code review, specs, tests).

Re: Multi-Agentic Software Development Is a Distributed Systems Problem

#26

Post by falcor84 »

pydry wrote: post #17
falcor84 wrote: post #2

The thing that TFA doesn't seem to go into is that these mathematical results apply to human agents in exactly the same way as they do to AI agents, and nevertheless we have massive codebases like Linux. If people can figure out how to do it, then there's no math that can help you prove that AIs can't.

Ive yet to see a human process which used an excessive number of cheap junior developers precisely architected to create high quality software. If that could have been achieved it would have been very profitable, too. There's no shortage of cheap, motivated interns/3rd world devs and the executive class prefer to rely on disposable resources even when it costs more overall. The net result was always the opposite thou…

I'm in absolute agreement that the AI coordination problem exists today when the AI is at junior level. I'm just saying that the mathematical argument is silly to apply to arbitrary future AIs, if and when they reach human capability. Because while coordination problems have not been mathematically solved, the world economy is a case in point that it is possible to coordinate human-level agents to achieve large scale projects at generally sufficient quality levels.

So to be clear, I'm not advising anyone to change their current token consumption habit. I'm just saying that it's silly to apply math to prove the impossibility of something we can literally see around us. It's like a mathematical proof that water isn't really wet.

Re: Multi-Agentic Software Development Is a Distributed Systems Problem

#27

Post by ramraj07 »

xer wrote: post #20

The fundamental assumptions of distributed systems is having multiple machines that fail independently, communicate over unreliable networks and have no shared clock has the consequence of needing to solve consensus, byzantine faults, ordering, consistency vs. availability and exactly-once delivery. However, AI agents don't share these problems in the classical sense. Building agents is about context attention, relev…

Curious idea (found your hn post) but cant figure out what the use case is..

Re: Multi-Agentic Software Development Is a Distributed Systems Problem

#28

Post by falcor84 »

Tade0 wrote: post #23
EagnaIonat wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.promptingguide.ai/techniques/knowledge

Sohnds like a great way to fill up the context before you even start.

Yes, what's your point? That is literally what it does - it adds relevant knowledge to the prompt before generating a response, in order to ground it me effectively.

Re: Multi-Agentic Software Development Is a Distributed Systems Problem

#29

Post by socketcluster »

I tried my hand at coding with multiple agents at the same time recently. I had to add related logic to 4 different repos. Basically an action would traverse all of them, one by one, carrying some data. I decided to implement the change in all of them at the same time with 4 Claude Code instances and it worked the first time.

It's crazy how good coding agents have become. Sometimes I barely even need to read the code because it's so reliable and I've developed a kind of sense for when I can trust it.

It boggles my mind how accurate it is when you give it the full necessary context. It's more accurate than any living being could possibly be. It's like it's pulling the optimal code directly from the fabric of the universe.

It's kind of scary to think that there might be AI as capable as this applied to things besides next token prediction... Such AI could probably exert an extreme degree of control over society and over individual minds.

I understand why people think we live in a simulation. It feels like the capability is there.

Re: Multi-Agentic Software Development Is a Distributed Systems Problem

#30

Post by rdevilla »

socketcluster wrote: post #29

I tried my hand at coding with multiple agents at the same time recently. I had to add related logic to 4 different repos. Basically an action would traverse all of them, one by one, carrying some data. I decided to implement the change in all of them at the same time with 4 Claude Code instances and it worked the first time. It's crazy how good coding agents have become. Sometimes I barely even need to read the code…

Please stop. I can't take HN seriously any more with comments like this here.
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