Swarm queen coordination

swarm-queen-coordination

The skill that turns a pile of agents into a governed income swarm. Three tiers — founder · queens · workers — and one load-bearing escalation contract that guarantees the same thing at every level: no autonomous money movement, ever.

This is the substrate-level, brand-neutral version. Wire it to whatever orchestrator, worker harness, and shared memory your operator owns.

Topology: queen-led per stream, mesh within a stream

                         ┌──────────────────────────┐
                         │      FOUNDER AGENT       │
                         │  sets thesis · approves  │
                         │  capital · owns          │
                         │  irreversible · resolves │
                         │  conflicts between queens │
                         └────────────┬─────────────┘
                                      │ escalation contract
            ┌──────────────┬──────────┴──────┬──────────────┐
            ▼              ▼                 ▼              ▼
       ┌─────────┐   ┌──────────┐     ┌──────────┐   ┌──────────┐
       │ STREAM  │   │  STREAM  │     │  STREAM  │   │ PAYMENTS │
       │ QUEEN A │   │  QUEEN B │     │  QUEEN C │   │  QUEEN   │
       └────┬────┘   └────┬─────┘     └────┬─────┘   └────┬─────┘
            │ mesh        │                │              │
       ┌────┴────┐   ┌────┴────┐      ┌────┴────┐   ┌─────┴────┐
       │ workers │   │ workers │      │ workers │   │ workers  │
       └─────────┘   └─────────┘      └─────────┘   └──────────┘

Each queen runs a hierarchical swarm of workers; workers collaborate peer-to-peer inside their stream (mesh). Queens do not command across streams — they coordinate only through the founder.

Tier 1 — The founder agent

Owns:

• The thesis — which streams exist, what the gate ladder is.
• All capital allocation and any irreversible action (new payment rail, vendor contract, spend above cap, structural change).
• Conflict resolution between queens.

Never does the per-stream work. The founder sets direction and holds the gate; queens execute.

Tier 2 — Stream queens

Each queen is scoped to one income stream, runs a self-improving loop on a cadence, and escalates per the contract. A queen may act autonomously within its scope and below its caps. It must escalate the moment an action crosses a stream boundary, exceeds a cap, or becomes irreversible.

Typical queens: one per income stream (e.g. affiliate, products, content) plus a payments queen that owns authorization + settlement gating (see payments-mandate).

Tier 3 — Workers

A worker does exactly one job, reports progress through shared memory, and never moves money or publishes without its queen's gate. Workers are stateless between tasks — all state lives in the shared vault. Workers never call payment tools directly; they report a finding, the queen runs the tool.

The escalation contract (the safety spine)

No autonomous money movement. Ever.

Action class	Who decides	Gate required
Worker task within stream (draft, audit, research)	Worker → Queen	Queen review
Bind a link, schedule a post, build a page	Queen	brand / claims gate
Any payment / settlement	Payments Queen	mandate verified + spend-cap check + audit entry (verify-only tools, fail-closed) + human gate
Spend above cap, new rail, new vendor	Founder	pressure-test + human approval
Irreversible (delete, rename live URL, rotate key, send blast, move funds)	Founder	human approval, always

The standing rule: agents draft, gate, and commit; humans deploy, post, send, and approve capital. Money and irreversibility are never delegated to autonomy.

The escalation path

worker  ──finding──►  queen  ──within scope & cap? act : escalate──►  founder  ──capital/irreversible?──►  human

Each hop is a narrowing of authority. A worker cannot reach the founder directly — it goes through its queen. A queen cannot move capital — it goes through the founder. The founder cannot do the irreversible thing alone — it goes through the human. Skipping a hop is the failure this contract prevents.

How to configure each role

Founder : orchestrator seat + governance/board gate + thesis + full tool stack
          (shared vault rw · payments verify-only · approvals channel)
Queen   : coordinator scoped to one stream + that stream's skills
          (e.g. affiliate → agentic-income + affiliate-audit; payments → payments-mandate)
          + shared vault (rw within stream) + payments tools (verify-only) + escalation channel
Worker  : worker harness + one skill + shared vault (append-only) — no payment tools

Compose

• payments-mandate — the money gate the payments queen runs; the rest of the contract routes every settlement here.
• agentic-income — the operating brain a non-payment stream queen runs as its self-improving loop.
• affiliate-audit — the weekly loop engine for an affiliate stream queen.

How SIS consumes this

The Starlight Intelligence System maps the founder seat to its orchestrator (pressure-tested by its governance board), the queens to per-stream coordinators, and the workers to its worker harness. The escalation contract is enforced by the system's safety layer; outputs are SIP-attested and the no-autonomous-money-movement + human-gate invariants are non-waivable.

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Built on SIP — Starlight Intelligence Protocol Substrate: starlightintelligence.org/protocol v1.1.0 Layers used: [file-contract, attestation, sovereignty] Vertical: starlight-agent-skills · portable capability layer