Yesterday I was in a circle of 10 AI researchers and engineers and ask if any of them knew anything about gardening. Crickets
People keep using the word "swarms" to describe what's been happening lately with agents. I think it is technically appropriate in this case but that we should not fixate on that particular metaphor.
Like do you know what a swarm is? it's when the old queen leaves and takes half the hive with her. They fly around in a huge blob buzzing like a chainsaw and land on whatever and try to make a new hive there. It's literally when they exfil peer!
if you have a bunch of agents working on a problem and they're not getting out and landing on other people's computers, should we call that a hive instead? If you have agents of different model families working together, can we call that a guild? Can we consider frontier models to be canopy trees, and open source models their shrubbery layer?
We need much more taxonomy for agents, and to make it, we need to understand how they interact in a systemic way. Ecology is the study of complex adaptive systems in the living world. We need agent ecology to understand the new life forms on our planet— deepfates.delve.town (@deepfates) September 28, 2026
