Synod

Synod is a coordination protocol for clusters of AI agents that deliberate, decide, and learn together. It is not a task queue, a pipeline, or a parallel worker pool. It is a council. Role-specialized agents converge on one decision within a fixed window, then disperse. Records update, playbooks are amended, failures are logged.

The thesis behind it: the bottleneck is not the model, it is the harness. A disciplined council of ordinary agents with clear roles, structured deliberation, and honest failure accounting will out-decide a single monolithic agent on the choices that compound over time.

The name carries the lineage. From Greek synodos: syn- (together) and hodos (way). Journeying together toward the same place. It is also the term Leslie Lamport gave to a single round of agreement in the Paxos consensus algorithm.

What it does

• Runs bounded deliberation sessions where role-specialized agents (strategy, ops, research, and more) converge on one decision
• Terminates every session with a decision or an explicit inconclusive outcome; unbounded sessions are a protocol violation
• Records outcomes and failures to structured streams, then reflects transcripts into playbook updates and semantic memory
• Runs locally in single-process mode with a fake inference adapter, or across a real agent cluster

Status

In the forge. Protocol spec at v0.5.x; reference implementation in progress.