From Babysitting Bots to Open Source Attention Routing: The Colony2 Agent-Cell Model

Single-agent chat loops require a human watching every step, and swarms multiply that burden until coordination becomes the binding constraint. This talk reviews an open-source approach to massive parallel agent coordination that decomposes infrastructure into pluggable components around one primitive: the cell, a repo-scoped runtime with its own context, capabilities, and contract. Because agents invoke explicit commands rather than acting in an opaque conversation, every step is an inspectable state transition. The cell's durable workflow runtime is built on Neon Postgres, recording execution as first-class state: jobs pause at wait points, retry on failure, resume after interruption, and carry full audit history. Human approvals become routable primitives in the graph.