wanghaisheng State Management
In a multi-agent system, state is the shared truth about what's happened, what's in progress, and what's been decided. Without state management, agents work with stale or conflicting information.
Types of State
- Task state: Where is the overall task in its lifecycle? Which subtasks are complete, in progress, or pending?
- Context state: What does each agent know? What has been shared? What's been summarised or dropped?
- User state: What are the user's preferences, history, and current emotional state?
- Decision state: What decisions have been made? What options were considered and rejected?
- Error state: What has failed? What's been retried? What's been escalated?
State Architecture Patterns
- Centralised state: One shared state store that all agents read from and write to. Simple but can be a bottleneck.
- Distributed state: Each agent maintains its own state and syncs with others. Flexible but risks inconsistency.
- Event-sourced state: State is built from a log of events. Every change is recorded. Auditable but complex.
- Blackboard pattern: Shared workspace where agents post results and read others' contributions. Good for collaborative problem-solving.
Designing State for Users
Users have expectations about what the system remembers:
- Within-session state: Everything said in this conversation should be remembered and consistent
- Cross-session state: Preferences, decisions, and context from past sessions should carry forward
- Cross-agent state: If one agent learned something, other agents should know it too
- User-controlled state: Users should be able to see, edit, and clear the system's memory
State Conflicts
When multiple agents modify state simultaneously:
- Last-write-wins: Simple but can lose information
- Merge strategies: Combine concurrent changes intelligently
- Conflict detection: Flag conflicts for human resolution
- Versioning: Keep history so conflicts can be resolved retrospectively
Design Artefacts
- State architecture diagrams
- State schema definitions (what's stored, where, by whom)
- State lifecycle specifications (creation, update, archival, deletion)
- Conflict resolution rules
- User-facing state visibility and control designs