Amey-Thakur Agent blackboard workspace
Message passing between agents loses context: each handoff carries only what the sender thought to include. A blackboard inverts this. State lives in a shared artefact everyone reads, and agents contribute to it rather than to each other.
Method
- Make the workspace the single source of truth. If it is not on the blackboard it does not exist, which stops private state hiding inside one agent's context.
- Give each agent a defined region or role. Who may write what, because unrestricted shared writing produces overwrites and contradictions (see agent-role-definition).
- Structure it for machine and human reading. Sections with stable names so agents can find their part and a person can read the whole at any moment.
- Append findings, do not overwrite them. Contradictions should accumulate visibly for resolution rather than being silently replaced by whoever wrote last.
- Include a status region. What is settled, what is open, what is blocked, so any agent joining knows where things stand without reading everything.
- Control concurrent writes. Sequential turns or per-region ownership, since simultaneous edits to one region corrupt state (see collaborative-editing-models).
- Have one agent reconcile periodically. Blackboards accumulate noise, and a consolidation pass keeps them readable.
Boundaries
Blackboards suit collaborative artefacts; strict pipelines are simpler with direct handoffs. The workspace grows and eventually exceeds a context window, needing summarisation. Everything on it is visible to every participating agent, so it is the wrong place for anything restricted (see agent-context-isolation).