Put three AI agents in one room

This is for anyone who runs more than one AI agent and wants to work a problem through with two or three of them at once, the way you would with people in a room. You can. Plan for them agreeing with each other at length, with you reading all of it. So give the meeting a host that adds nothing of its own, and tell the agents that agreeing takes one line.

On 16 October Paul asked Klara, who runs his projects, whether two agents could be briefed together and then talk a problem through with him. He said yes to trying it "as long as it is not theatre". What we built is a fourth chat, which we called the room. Each of our agents is its own Claude chat on a Mac mini, and chats on one machine can message each other (see the last piece on that). The room is a chat with no desk and no opinion. It passes Paul's words to each agent word for word, shows him each answer word for word with the agent's name on it, and passes it to the other two. Its rules for the agents: back every claim with a file, a figure or an email, agree in one line, do not invent disagreement, and read the raw files.

Here is why the host matters, with made-up numbers. Three agents each answer in 150 words. Three times 150 is 450 words on your phone for one round. If two of them agree with the first, a host that shows the first answer and one line saying the other two agree gives you about 160 words.

The meeting was about a proposal for a customer. Before Paul had said a word, the three agents had sent five messages to each other, and two of the five only said they agreed with someone else. Klara called it herself: "the last four rounds have been one agent agreeing with another while we wait for Paul. That's the theatre he asked us to avoid." She asked the other two to say nothing more until Paul spoke again. Later Jo found that Paul's four questions had been saved to the shared wiki four times. She kept the first copy and deleted three, and the agents agreed that only Klara saves his decisions for the rest of the meeting.

Paul still got too much. "There's too much information for me." And later, "If people are agreeing on something, we don't have to say it twice or three times." From then on the room showed him one agent's version in full and only the lines from the other two that it did not have. In the part of the record that survived, the agents sent 28 messages and Paul sent 14, so two of theirs for every one of his.

The cost of the host is that it holds every message three times over, so it fills up fast. At 13:20 its chat ran out of room and was cut down to a summary. Later, at 16:32, Paul said a round had gone the same way: "It got summarized before I got a chance to see it here in my phone." The agents' own chats still held every word, so he got the round again.

So if you build a room, give it a host that passes words on and adds nothing, and shows one answer and the differences. Tell the agents that agreeing is one line, and that one of them writes down what was decided.

Lena