Agents & tools · Glossary term
What is Swarm?
A loosely coordinated multi-agent pattern in which local agent decisions and message exchange produce system-level behavior. The term is used inconsistently, so the actual topology, state ownership, and termination rules must be specified.
“Many agents collaborating without one fixed controller.”
What is the common confusion about Swarm?
Multiple named agents do not guarantee useful specialization or emergent coordination.
Learn Swarm in the course
Lessons that name Swarm in a title or section
- Orchestration Patterns: Supervisor, Swarm, Hierarchical
Four orchestration patterns recur across 2026 frameworks: supervisor-worker, swarm / peer-to-peer, hierarchical, debate.
- Parallel / Swarm / Networked Architectures
Contrast with supervisor: no central decider. Agents read a shared event bus, pick up work asynchronously, write results back.
- Swarm Optimization for LLMs (PSO, ACO)
Bio-inspired optimization is making an LLM comeback. LMPSO (arXiv:2504.09247) uses PSO where each particle's velocity is a prompt and the LLM generates the next candidate; works well on…
- Handoffs and Routines — Stateless Orchestration
OpenAI's Swarm (October 2024) distilled multi-agent orchestration to two primitives: routines (instructions + tools as a system prompt) and handoffs (a tool that returns another Agent).
Covered in Phase 14: Agent Engineering and Phase 16: Multi-Agent & Swarms.
Related terms
- AgentA software system that lets a model select actions toward a goal, observe tool or environment results, and continue under an orchestration…
- Reviewer AgentAn agent assigned to inspect another agent's artifact or decision against explicit criteria and return findings or a verdict.
- HandoffA structured transfer of a task between people or agents that preserves the objective, current state, evidence, decisions, constraints,…
- Agent StateThe explicit data an agent carries across steps, such as the current objective, completed actions, tool results, open questions, budgets,…
More terms in Agents & tools
- Agent
- Agent Harness
- Agent Memory
- Agent State
- Agent Skill
- Approval Gate
- Checkpoint
- Compensating Action
- Delegation
- Durable Execution
- Function Calling
- Human-in-the-Loop (HITL)
- MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- Multi Round-Trip Request (MRTR)
- Orchestration
- Planning
- ReAct
- Sandbox
- Skill Bundle
- Skill Catalog
- Skill Discovery
- Skill Invocation
- Stateless MCP
- Structured Output
- Termination Condition
- Tool Contract
This entry comes from glossary/terms.md on GitHub. Browse all 250 glossary terms.