Many small AI assistants instead of one big one
Trying to give organization and memory to a multi-agent structure
I keep hitting the same wall, and I think I have been solving it backwards.
When I work with an AI assistant on anything that lasts longer than an afternoon, the conversation gets long, and somewhere in that length it stops being useful. It forgets what we settled on Tuesday. I end up being the memory. I re-explain the same context over and over, and after a while the re-explaining is most of the work.
The obvious fix is to give it a better memory. I am starting to think that is the wrong fix.
What I keep sketching instead is not one assistant with a longer attention span. It is several, each with a smaller job, and some shape between them. One that only holds the plan and never does the work. One that owns a single area and knows that area properly. One that gets a single task, does it, says what happened, and goes away.
That last one is the part I find most interesting, because it is disposable on purpose. It does not need to remember anything. It needs to be told enough.
The appeal is not that this is more powerful. It is that each piece has less to hold, so there is less for it to lose.
What I do not know yet is where the borders are. I'm playing with it by putting a structure to Claude Code's new feature where it can have named sessions that can send messages to each other. It feels compelling, but it will take some tuning.
How much does the one doing the task need to know about why it is doing it? Too little and it will solve the wrong problem, confidently. Too much and I have rebuilt the long conversation with extra steps.
What happens when one of them is wrong? Not broken, just wrong, in a way that reads as perfectly reasonable. The others have no particular reason to doubt it. Could be that is the actual hard problem and the roles are the easy part.
And who decides what is worth interrupting me about? If the answer is everything, I have added work rather than removed it. If the answer is nothing, I have lost track of what is happening.
I do not have answers to any of that yet. But I feel like I'm pulling at something worthwhile. Writing it down mostly to find out where it breaks.