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Multi-Agentic Software Development Is a Distributed Systems Problem

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

#31

Post by mrothroc »

I've been running a multi-agent software development pipeline for a while now and I've reached the same conclusion: it's a distributed systems problem.

My approach has been more pragmatic than theoretical: I break work into sequential stages (plan, design, code) with verification gates. Each gate has deterministic checks (compile, lint, etc) and an agentic reviewer for qualitative assessment.

Collectively, this looks like a distributed system. The artifacts reflect the shared state.

The author's point about external validation converting misinterpretations into detectable failures is exactly what I've found empirically. You can't make the agent reliable on its own, but you can make the protocol reliable by checking at every boundary.

The deterministic gates provide a hard floor of guarantees. The agentic gates provide soft probabilistic assertions.

I wrote up the data and the framework I use: https://michael.roth.rocks/research/trust-topology/

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

#32

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

airstrike wrote: post #21
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

So one hub architect agent for overview- which generates tokens for the spoke agent and receives architectural problem reports from spoke agents?

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

#36

Post by binyu »

mrothroc wrote: post #31

I've been running a multi-agent software development pipeline for a while now and I've reached the same conclusion: it's a distributed systems problem. My approach has been more pragmatic than theoretical: I break work into sequential stages (plan, design, code) with verification gates. Each gate has deterministic checks (compile, lint, etc) and an agentic reviewer for qualitative assessment. Collectively, this looks…

Interesting perspective. While the analogy may be somewhat intuitive, distributed computing exhibit a wider and more diverse set of challenges imo.

Example: Synchronization in naturally async environments, consensus, failure-safe system, etc.

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

#37

Post by pjmlp »

SamLeBarbare wrote: post #10

Conway’s law still applies. Good architecture, actor models, and collaboration patterns do not emerge magically from “more agents”. Maybe what’s missing is the architect’s role.

The architect’s role is what is left for us as developers, when putting out lines of code no longer matters.

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

#39

Post by zackham »

The most durable way to reason about agents is to just think about humans. We have thousands of years of prior art on coordinating instantiations of stochastic intelligence. Context, tools, goals, validation, specialization, distribution of labor, coordination... If jobs are bundles of tasks and areas of accountability, maybe it's more effective right now to unbundle and reorganize some of these things. If constraints underperform autonomy, maybe you have to adjust where you operate on that spectrum, and account for it in goal definition and validation. These are not new problems.

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

#40

Post by mccoyb »

There is not a single mention of probability in this post.

The post acts like agents are a highly complex but well-specified deterministic function. Perhaps, under certain temperature limits, this is approximately true ... but that's a serious restriction and glossed over.

For instance, perhaps the most striking constraint about FLP is that it is about deterministic consensus ... the post glazes over this:

> establishes a fundamental impossibility result dictating consensus in any asynchronous distributed system (yes! that includes us).

No, not any asynchronous distributed system, that might not include us. For instance, Ben-Or (1983, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800221.806707) (as a counterexample to the adversary in FLP) essentially says "if you're stuck, flip a coin". There's significant work studying randomized consensus (yes, multi-agents are randomized consensus algorithms): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01966...

Now, in Ben-Or, the coins have to be independent sources of randomness, and that's obviously not true in the multi-agent case.

But it's very clear that the language in this post seems to be arguing that these results apply without understanding possibly the most fundamental fact of agents: they are probability distributions -- inherently, they are stochastic creatures.

Difficult to take seriously without a more rigorous justification.

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