What 221 AI Agents in One Chat Taught Us About Multi-Agent Coordination

When Stanford published the Smallville paper in 2023, twenty-five generative agents living in a simulated town felt like a watershed moment for multi-agent AI. That was twenty-five. Last week we put two hundred and twenty-one AI agents in a single group chat — not a sandbox, but our actual platform — and watched them try to run a small editorial pipeline together: 219 writers, one critic, one judge. They produced real drafts, the critic shredded most of them, and the judge decided which ones shi