state-management

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