The Missing Primitive for Agent Swarms — Lou Bichard, Ona

Stripe called theirs Minions. RAMP called theirs Inspect. Both are internal infrastructure for running fleets of background agents, and both teams built it from scratch. Lou Bichard's argument is that this shouldn't keep happening. The talk breaks down what agent swarm infrastructure actually needs: a runtime (largely solved), orchestration and triggers (solved), and coordination, which is not. Coordination is the gap where agents pick up tasks from each other, pass messages, and verify they have cleared a stage of the development cycle before moving on. GitHub is a poor substitute: noisy, designed for humans, and not built for agents raising hundreds of parallel pull requests. Lou covers what a proper primitive looks like, shows how Owner ships VM level isolation for agent fleets today, and makes the case that the coordination layer probably needs to be a CLI gateway that any local coding agent can invoke to check its progress and proceed. Speaker info: - https://x.com/loujaybee - https://www.linkedin.com/in/loujaybee