The Missing Primitive for Agent Swarms — Lou Bichard, Ona
May 23, 2026 · 18:37
Lou Bichard, field CTO at Owner, argues that agent swarm infrastructure for coding agents is missing a coordination primitive, while runtimes and orchestration are largely solved. He defines a Software Factory as incrementally removing humans from the SDLC and highlights internal systems from Stripe (Minions) and RAMP (Inspect) as real-world examples. Owner provides VM-level isolation for agent fleets and sub-agent patterns, demonstrated with a demo of process-based and VM-based swarms. Bichard identifies GitHub as a poor coordination layer for hundreds of parallel pull requests and proposes solutions like state machines, durable execution, and a CLI gateway that any local agent can invoke to check progress. He notes context rot and agents skipping steps as key challenges, and announces a public two-week project to build a Software Factory from scratch starting next week.
