A Million Agents Is a Distributed System Problem

I think about agents the way I think about people. One agent is a worker. A thousand agents is an organization, and an organization of machines is a distributed system.

People keep telling me agents can run forever. Technically that's true. You can call a model in a loop until your credit card declines. But the agent still runs on finite stuff: tokens, context, compute, memory, tools, money. Something always runs out.

Humans aren't that different. We work for a while and get tired. Our working memory is tiny. We forget things. So we write the important parts down, sleep, and come back the next morning with a clear head and the same identity.