Staff the swarm

Staff the Swarm

Decompose wide work into independent lanes, run them in parallel, make the checkers adversarial, and hand back one synthesized answer instead of a pile of agent transcripts.

Inputs

• A wide task: many files, many pages, many angles, or many independent questions
• The orchestration surface available (subagents, workflow runner, or sequential fallback)

Steps

1. Check the shape. Swarms pay off when lanes are independent — pieces that don't need each other's intermediate results. If every step feeds the next, stay solo; a swarm on sequential work is overhead wearing a costume.

2. Cut the lanes. Split by the natural seam: by page, by module, by dimension (correctness / security / performance / UX), by search angle. Lanes must not overlap, and their union must cover the task — write the coverage down.

3. Write each agent a real brief. Per lane: the goal, the boundaries ("only the checkout flow", "don't touch other modules"), the expected shape of the result (structured findings, not prose), and the definition of done. A vague brief returns a vague transcript.

4. Dispatch in parallel, track centrally. Fire independent lanes concurrently. Keep one scoreboard: lane, status, result summary.

5. Verify adversarially. Findings from stage one are claims, not facts. Send each significant claim to a checker whose job is to refute it — and when a claim can fail in more than one way, give each checker a different lens (does it reproduce? is it exploitable? does it matter?). Majority-refuted claims die. Verified ones carry their evidence forward.

6. Merge like an editor, not a stapler. Deduplicate across lanes, resolve contradictions explicitly (two agents disagreeing is a finding in itself), rank what survives by severity, and write the synthesis in one voice.

7. Report coverage honestly. Name what wasn't covered: lanes that failed, items sampled instead of swept, checks skipped. Silent truncation reads as "covered everything" — that's a lie of omission.

Conventions

• One lane, one agent, one definition of done. Agents that share a lane duplicate work; agents without a DoD return essays.
• The orchestrator synthesizes but does not re-do lane work — if a lane came back weak, re-brief and re-dispatch rather than quietly patching.
• Structured results beat prose: ask lanes for findings as file/claim/ evidence triples so the merge is mechanical.

Edge Cases

• Lanes return contradictory results. Don't average them. Escalate the contradiction to a dedicated tie-breaker check with both results in hand.
• No parallel orchestration available. The pattern degrades gracefully: run the same lanes and briefs sequentially — the discipline (lanes, DoD, adversarial verify, honest coverage) is the value, parallelism is just the speed.
• The swarm is more expensive than the task. Two or three lanes is a fine swarm. If briefing costs more than doing, do it solo.