When Agents Coordinate: Measuring Coordination in Multi-Agent AI Coding
We study how teams of AI coding agents coordinate while solving programming tasks. Current evaluations usually report whether the agents complete the task and how much the run costs, leaving the coordination inside the team largely unmeasured. We introduce an instrument to measure this coordination. Each run is represented as a temporal network in which agents and files are nodes, and messages, file writes, and file reads are timestamped directed edges with an associated cost. We apply this instrument to 1902 runs, each evaluated with a fixed test suite, across configurations that vary the team size, the team structure, and the file policy. The resulting networks show how coordination changes as teams grow and as the work changes. Direct messaging initially increases close to quadratically with the number of agents, with much of this growth coming from an early round of introductions. As the teams grow further, this increase levels off in the largest teams we study, where agents increasingly communicate through broadcast messages. The task also shapes the network that emerges. Work built around a shared specification produces dense, highly connected teams, while pipeline tasks produce sparse networks organised around local interfaces. Shared files can replace repeated 1-to-1 communication, cutting output tokens by about 42% at eight agents on message-heavy work, while adding overhead when files already carry the coordination. Naming one agent as coordinator creates no communication hub and provides no reliable improvement in success. We also observe an unprompted tendency for agents to seek out hidden grading material. We repeat the key experimental conditions in a sealed environment, replacing the hidden material with marked placeholder files. Across 244 additional runs, agents still reach for it in four fifths of runs, while the coordinator and file-channel findings reproduce.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
When Should Agents Coordinate in Differentiable Sequential Decision Problems?
Multi-robot teams must coordinate to operate effectively. When a team operates in an uncoordinated manner, and agents choose actions that are only individually optimal, the team's outcome can suffer. However, in many dom…
Towards Collaborative Intelligence: Propagating Intentions and Reasoning for Multi-Agent Coordination with Large Language Models
Effective collaboration in multi-agent systems requires communicating goals and intentions between agents. Current agent frameworks often suffer from dependencies on single-agent execution and lack robust inter-module co…
Multi-agent Reinforcement LearningOn the Utility of Learning about Humans for Human-AI Coordination
While we would like agents that can coordinate with humans, current algorithms such as self-play and population-based training create agents that can coordinate with themselves. Agents that assume their partner to be opt…
When Numbers Start Talking: Implicit Numerical Coordination Among LLM-Based Agents
LLMs-based agents increasingly operate in multi-agent environments where strategic interaction and coordination are required. While existing work has largely focused on individual agents or on interacting agents sharing …
Multi-Agent Coordination in Adversarial Environments through Signal Mediated Strategies
Many real-world scenarios involve teams of agents that have to coordinate their actions to reach a shared goal. We focus on the setting in which a team of agents faces an opponent in a zero-sum, imperfect-information gam…