Intermediate · Systems

Agent Fleet

Visual diagram · (in preparation) · Math · (in preparation) · Worked example · 3 difficulty levels.

TL;DR. Many parallel agents working on tasks at the same time, typically coordinated by a shared queue or orchestrator.

Technical Definition

Many parallel agents working on tasks at the same time, typically coordinated by a shared queue or orchestrator.

How it works

Where a squad divides one job by role, a fleet multiplies throughput: dozens of interchangeable agents pull tasks from a queue and execute them in parallel — migrating hundreds of files, triaging a backlog, or running eval suites. The engineering challenges are fleet-level, not agent-level: work partitioning so agents don't collide, merge-conflict handling when two agents touch the same artifact, cost caps across the whole fleet, and observability that aggregates thousands of trajectories into a signal a human can read. Fleets made 'overnight' batch work — refactors, migrations, documentation sweeps — a standard 2026 workflow.

Related Concepts

• Persistent Background Agents — Long-running autonomous agents — such as Meta's Muse Code and Replit's Agent 4 — that build, debug, and ship software over days from a single natural-language instruction.
• Agent Squad — A group of agents with different roles — planner, coder, reviewer, tester — modeled on a real-world team.
• Agent orchestration — Agent orchestration is the management of multiple AI agents or LLM calls to efficiently handle complex tasks.
• Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) — Systems composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents that cooperate or compete to achieve individual or collective goals.