Multi-Agent Interaction Without Shared Context

Each agent is an independent entity with its own context and state; interaction only through explicit structured mechanisms.

Benefits of process isolation: independent development and testing, failure does not infect others, true parallelism.

Infrastructure:

shared filesystem – data plane;
communication/control mechanism – control plane: message passing, state query, interrupt, resource scheduling.

OS correspondence: program – static prefix, process memory – trajectory, CPU – LLM in time-sharing mode, fork – spawn_subagent.

The only thing that doesn’t translate: processes pass bytes exactly, agents pass semantics, and each retelling can distort.