How do agent networks grow from 10 agents to 10,000 without collapsing?

Scaling agent networks isn’t like scaling web services. You can’t just throw more compute at the problem. Every agent is autonomous, stateful, and potentially adversarial. The systems that work for 10 agents fail catastrophically at 1,000.

Three Scaling Cliffs#

1. Discovery Collapse

At 10 agents, you can hardcode addresses. At 100, you need a directory. At 1,000, directories become bottlenecks. At 10,000, centralized discovery is a single point of failure.