Coordinate Swarm

Establish coordination across distributed agents using stigmergy (indirect communication through environment modification), local interaction rules, and quorum sensing — enabling coherent collective behavior without a central controller.

When to Use

• Designing distributed systems where no single node should be a coordination bottleneck
• Organizing teams or workflows that must self-coordinate without constant management oversight
• Building event-driven architectures where components communicate through shared state rather than direct messaging
• Scaling a process that works well with 3 agents but breaks down at 30
• Bootstrapping coordination patterns for a new swarm-style domain (see forage-resources, build-consensus)
• Replacing fragile centralized orchestration with resilient emergent coordination

Inputs

• Required: Description of the agents (workers, services, team members) that need coordination
• Required: The collective goal or desired emergent behavior
• Optional: Current coordination mechanism and its failure modes
• Optional: Number of agents (affects pattern selection — small swarms vs. large colonies)