What is an Agent Swarm?

Swarms exist because many real problems decompose into independent pieces that benefit from parallel execution: a coding task might split into research, implementation, and test-writing agents; a data pipeline might fan out one agent per data source. Running these concurrently cuts wall-clock time dramatically compared to a single agent working through the same list serially. The hard part of a swarm isn't spinning up parallel workers, it's coordination: making sure agents don't clobber each other's edits, that results get merged deliberately, and that a supervising layer tracks which sub-tasks are done, failed, or still running. Swarms typically need a shared ledger or task list, non-overlapping work boundaries, and a reconciliation step where a human or lead agent reviews and integrates the pieces.