Multi-Agent Programming Is Just Distributed Systems
Onlydole · reddit · 2026-07-20
The author shares failure modes encountered when running multiple coding agents in parallel: "zombie agents" still running after the CLI is closed, rolling back each other's code, and discovering mid-task that other agents are working in the same codebase. The post cites a perspective: agents are fundamentally distributed systems, meaning they suffer from classic issues like asynchrony, crashes, concurrency, and partitioning.\n\nThe post concludes with a practical question: when you cannot rely on detailed upfront planning but can't revert to a much slower single-agent serial process, how do people actually collaborate? Examples include shared logs, separate worktrees per agent, or other methods.
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