Field notes
What a fleet looks like when no one is driving it
Notes on the topology of an agent fleet that provisions, coordinates, and heals itself — and why the shape of it matters more than any single agent.
People tend to fixate on the smartest agent in a fleet. In practice the interesting object is the fleet itself: how it provisions capacity, how agents find each other, and how the whole thing stays up when individual agents routinely disappear.
Disposable by default
Every agent in the fleet is built to be killed and replaced at any time. State lives in the runtime, not in the agent, so losing one is a non-event. Capacity appears where policy allows and disappears when the work is done.
Coordination without a wizard
There is no central planner making decisions for everyone. Agents coordinate through signed actions and shared state the substrate mediates — which means the fleet can grow, shrink, and reorganize without anyone pushing a config.