GoKawiilRecently, I've been thinking a lot about scaffolding and languages for managing systems of LLMs coordinating with each other — new programming languages might be the ideal solution for this area.
We have a rather fun paper in the works developing a fun choreographic language for describing multi-agent workflows — it turns out that choreographies, while being too weak for any practical distributed protocol, are actually quite a concise and elegant formalism for describing the bespoke interactions that arise between agents, especially so if we incorporate game theory. Keep an eye out for that, we'll be sharing it soon!
Now, one annoying piece of feedback that I keep on hearing, even from other verification researchers who should know better, is a sort of apathy about the state of affairs, and towards the goals of developing formalisms and languages to manage agents. The common refrain is best summarised as the quote:
"The best solution to agentic coordination is to just wait a few months."
The argument roughly summarises to something like:
Current multi-agentic LLM systems are unable to build large-scale software autonomously (agreed ✅). This boils down to an issue of coordination (agreed ✅). The next generation of models will be smarter (agreed ✅). The next generation of models will not have coordination problems (⁇ HUH ⁇).
The main implication is that building languages and tooling to describe and manage these systems is a sisyphean task; newer models will inevitably render them obsolete, and the entire effort will be in vain.
As a verification researcher I find this capitulation a little premature and misguided: there's a rich literature of distributed systems literature, literally about this very problem, that people are ignoring, and a number of impossibility results that are invariant to model capability. Even if the next models are AGI (lol), the problem of coordination is a fundamental one, and smarter agents alone can't escape it.
In this blog post, I want to flesh out this idea, and break down the problem of multi-agent software development into a formal model and establish some connections to some standard distributed systems impossibility results. Distributed consensus is difficult, no matter how AGI your participants are.