Coordination
An annotated collection of 5 books, papers & essays on coordination, spanning 1997 to 2026. Featuring works by Eric Raymond, Thomas Malone, Clay Shirky and 2 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
The founding essay of the open-source movement. The thesis: the decentralised, seemingly chaotic model (the bazaar) produces better software than the planned, controlled one (the cathedral). Raymond codifies what Linux p…
The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life
Malone extends his 1987 paper with Yates and Benjamin to argue that technology is pushing organisations toward radical decentralisation — not as an ideology but as the inevitable economic consequence of falling communica…
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
The cost of organising people falls to zero on the internet, and that wipes out intermediaries and layers of management that used to be necessary. Shirky documents how informal groups achieve results that once demanded f…
Towards a Science of Scaling Agent Systems
The first quantitative scaling principles for multi-agent AI systems, derived from 260 configurations across six benchmarks. Three findings matter: independent agent swarms can amplify baseline errors up to 17 times; too…
Single-Agent LLMs Outperform Multi-Agent Systems on Multi-Hop Reasoning Under Equal Thinking Token Budgets
The paper that forced the multi-agent debate to control for what it should have controlled from the start: computational budget. Tran and Kiela gave single and multi-agent LLM systems identical reasoning token budgets an…