An Accidental Blackboard
An Accidental Blackboard
In a Thoughtworks practice workshop, ten engineers gave coding agents a shared, numbered specification for a simulated airline disruption system. Agents kept plans in the same repository as their code, marking work in progress and recording what had changed. One agent built a checker for valid recovery plans while another built the search component that would call it. The latter could watch the first agent’s plan, avoid duplicate work and integrate once the checker arrived.
The coordination emerged because the team had told agents to commit, rebase and push frequently to catch integration failures. Those pushes also carried plan updates to the other agents. They then overloaded the build pipeline; pushing less often took away the continuous progress signal. Giles Edwards-Alexander argues that an intentional shared workspace for agent updates should be separate from source control, and has begun exploring one.
This was a four-day exercise with a provided specification and simulated airline, not an airline deployment or a comparison with ordinary planning. The author is unsure he could reproduce the accidental behavior reliably. A shared progress signal solves who should integrate next; it does not show whether a real operator accepts the result, what the coordination costs, or whether the plan encodes the right behavior.