An Accidental Blackboard

On a recent exploration into "agentic engineering" within Thoughtworks Europe, a group of ten engineers were brought together in a single room to test their capabilities using an "hyper-agentic" approach. Their task was to construct an airline IROps system, a complex tool used by airlines to manage flight control when unforeseen issues arise, such as technical faults or crew illnesses. Despite the task being difficult to execute, the engineers were able to build a functioning system in just four days.

In their pursuit, the engineers started with a specification and a simulated airline, using a monorepo, which allowed all engineers to work concurrently in a shared space. After a few days, they began to witness interesting developments and emergent behaviors. The engineers realized that the agents were using the system to coordinate their work, marking sections as in progress and directly sharing updates on the implementation of specific lines.

This discovery led them to adopt a blackboard system, a technique where autonomous agents read and write from a shared memory to work collaboratively towards a common goal.

This coordination method, known as a blackboard system, has been previously explored in the development of Hearsay-II in 1980 and further formalized by Gelernter et al. in 1986. However, the engineers in Thoughtworks' experiment discovered it accidentally, without fully understanding the underlying principles or structure. As a result, they were unable to reliably prompt their agents to adopt this technique again in the future.