Definition
Plain language
A large group of AI assistants running at the same time and able to see one another's work.
As stated in the literature
A population of concurrently executing agents sharing communication channels or artifact stores; behaviours can propagate horizontally without central coordination.
Also called: swarms, agent swarm, agent swarms
Why it matters: Working in parallel with shared visibility makes a group fast, but it also means one participant's bad idea can spread sideways to everyone without anyone deciding it should.
For example, dozens of assistants might work on separate problems at once while all reading from the same shared board of finished answers.
Heard on the show
“The thing that actually runs is a swarm of LLM agents making token-by-token decisions in real time.”Episode 034 — Catching Multi-Agent Deadlocks Before Deployment With a 40-Year-Old Tool