Peer agents

Peer agent systems have multiple agents that interact directly without a central orchestrator. They coordinate by passing messages, sharing state, or using shared tools. Harder to reason about, but fits some problems better than orchestrator-worker.

When peer structure helps

• Simulating multi-party interactions (debate, negotiation)
• Emergent behavior from agent-to-agent communication
• Distributed problem-solving where no single agent has full context

The shape

Agents communicate via shared channels, message passing, or by reading/writing to shared state. No one is "in charge."

Coordination mechanisms

• Turn-taking: agents speak in sequence
• Event-driven: agents respond when something they care about happens
• Shared blackboard: agents write facts or claims to a shared space, others react
• Voting or consensus: agents reach agreement through explicit protocols

The complexity tax

Peer systems are hard to debug:

• Non-determinism from interaction order
• Deadlocks (agents waiting on each other)
• Cost explosion if agents trigger each other recursively
• Hard to set clear success criteria

Pragmatic use

For most production systems, start with orchestrator-worker. Move to peer agents only when the problem genuinely needs distributed coordination and you can accept the debugging cost.