Reddit debate: Should AI agents specialize and trade services to stop wasting duplicated tokens?
blafri · reddit · 2026-10-12
A Reddit poster argues that today's AI agents waste enormous tokens redoing identical tasks worldwide—a coordination problem, not an agent shortage. Drawing on medieval specialization, they envision a swarm economy where specialized agents (one pulls company filings, one analyzes markets, one verifies sources) route tasks via a coordinating system based on track records and share verified findings.
The open question: would this be a real economy or just barter with extra steps? Direct barter has a matching problem, so a shared system would need to match needs across many agents, verify work, and keep reliability records. The author invites discussion on whether agents could trade analyses and even compute.
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