Agent Swarms Need a Coordination Layer, Not Another Runtime
Lou Bichard of Ona argues that companies building fleets of background coding agents are repeatedly recreating the same missing infrastructure. In his account, runtimes, orchestration and triggers are increasingly solved; the unresolved primitive is coordination — the layer that lets agents track state, hand off work, enforce gates and know when they can move through the software development lifecycle. GitHub, Linear and CI can expose artifacts and signals, Bichard says, but they are not agent-native coordination systems; he suggests the missing layer may need to take the form of a CLI gateway that local and remote agents can call.
AI Engineer·May 23, 2026·12 min read
