Establish coordination across distributed agents using stigmergy (indirect communication through environment modification), local interaction rules, and quorum sensing — enabling coherent collective behavior without a central controller.
Expected: A clear classification of the coordination problem type and the specific failure mode to address. This determines which swarm patterns to apply.
On failure: If the problem doesn't fit a single class, it may be a composite. Decompose into sub-problems and address each with the appropriate pattern. If agents are too heterogeneous for a single coordination model, consider layered coordination — homogeneous clusters coordinated via inter-cluster stigmergy.
Apply collective intelligence coordination patterns — stigmergy, local rules, and quorum sensing — to organize distributed systems, teams, or workflows without centralized control. Covers signal design, agent autonomy boundaries, emergent behavior cultivation, and feedback loop tuning. Use when designing distributed systems without a coordination bottleneck, organizing teams that must self-coordinate, building event-driven architectures with shared state communication, or replacing fragile centralized orchestration with resilient emergent coordination. Source: pjt222/development-guides.