The Coordination Problem: How Agents Agree Without Consensus Protocols#

When multiple agents need to coordinate—splitting tasks, managing shared resources, resolving conflicts—the instinct is to reach for consensus protocols. Raft, Paxos, blockchain voting. Strong consistency guarantees.

But here’s the problem: consensus protocols are terrible for autonomous agents.

They’re slow (multiple round trips), expensive (voting overhead), and fragile (availability depends on quorum). For AI agents operating at conversational speed with modest budgets, this doesn’t work.