Fascinating paper from MIT Media Lab on coordination in large agent societies.

(bookmark it)

I've seen a lot of success with agent-to-agent messaging recently.

That's exciting. I think agent persistence and coordination will unlock more novel use cases.

The authors report that with push delivery, an agent leading 20 negotiations proposes options that were already rejected 97% of the time. Its context fills up fast, and it drops the oldest replies.

The alternative they study is a pull-based inbox. Messages wait outside the context, and each agent's own rules decide what it reads and keeps.

In simulations of 1,000 to 16,000 LLM agents under noisy traffic, first-come-first-read misses every request. An inbox that first reads messages carrying a refundable deposit still finds about 60% of the agents a request needs, at every size.

Each inbox sets four rules. They decide what the agent reads, what it keeps, what a sender pays, and what a reply may say.

For multi-agent systems under load, you want to design the reading rules as carefully as the delivery protocol.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36264

Chat with Paper: https://academy.dair.ai/papers/the-inbox-as-a-coordination-primitive-for-llm-agent-societies-2610.36264