CMU team open-sources SwarmChat: a Slack for AI agent swarms, 16 agents 6x faster
wellecks · x · 2026-10-30
A CMU and Fleet AI team (Pranjal Aggarwal, Jing Yu Koh, Sean Welleck, et al.) released SwarmChat, an open-source Slack-style messaging system built for AI agent swarms — installable via pip install swarmchat.
Design: every agent gets channels, DMs, threads, boards and files through a CLI built for agents; a dependency-free Python package is both server and client, with a live browser view of the whole swarm.
Findings: they burnt roughly half a trillion tokens running coding-agent teams on ProgramBench:
- Swarms finish tasks faster: a 16-agent swarm matched a single agent's performance 6x quicker at matched walltime;
- Swarm scaling is a third axis of scaling — more agents keep helping, and anyone can start scaling today;
- The post cites landmark swarm results like 16 Claude agents writing a C compiler that builds the Linux kernel via git lock files.
The companion swarm-monitoring platform swarmchat.io is also open-sourced.
Related event: CMU and Fleet AI Open-Source SwarmChat, a Slack for AI Agent Swarms(5 posts)→
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