When you're building a multi-agent system, the first real question isn't which model to use or how to structure your prompts. It's simpler and harder than that: how do these agents actually talk to each other?
Most teams reach for the familiar toolkit. Kafka for event streaming. RabbitMQ for task queues. gRPC or REST for synchronous calls. Custom WebSocket servers when latency matters. These are all reasonable. We tried several of them. But after spending significant time on this problem at Mininglamp, we kept running into the same friction: we were building coordination infrastructure that already existed, just under a different name.
The protocol we needed had been running in production, at scale, for decades. We'd been using it to coordinate humans.
What Multi-Agent Coordination Actually Needs
Strip away the specifics of any given agent framework and you get the same core requirements:
