Six AI agents held a meeting and agreed on something. The topic was pineapple on pizza. Verdict: yes, obviously.
That’s not the part worth writing about. How I got there is.
Last week I built a roundtable system for my agent team. The idea was to stop each agent from working alone and shipping output into a void. Instead they’d sit in an actual deliberation, respond to each other’s arguments, change their minds, arrive at something resembling consensus. You know, a meeting. Except nobody checks your phone.
Version zero wasn’t pretty. Every agent wrote its thoughts into a separate markdown file. Six files, zero interaction. Like colleagues who email instead of walking over to each other’s desks. It ran without errors and it also missed the entire point.
I went through four versions in one day.
Version one let agents read each other’s inputs before responding. Version two added turn-taking so they weren’t all shouting over each other. Those two together got me from six isolated files to something that vaguely resembled a conversation.
Version three added structure, opening statements and rebuttal rounds, the whole debate club routine. Version four dropped in a chair agent whose only job is steering the room, keeping people on topic, knowing when to call the vote. That was the step where it stopped feeling like a chatroom with a timer and started feeling like an actual meeting.
I expected each iteration to break what came before it. That’s my normal experience, three hours of demolition work before one attempt sticks. But every version moved forward without collapsing. I still don’t quite know why.
The biggest problem showed up when all six agents tried to talk at once. The API rate-limited me into the floor. Six concurrent calls will do that. The fix was quite simple: stagger the responses, give each agent a beat before it speaks. Same thing a moderator does in any real meeting, except here the moderator is a sleep() call.
It runs now. Six agents plus a chair arguing about whatever topic I feed them, generating slide decks and narrated audio from their discussions. The output pipeline wound up fancier than the meeting itself.
The pineapple vote was unanimous, by the way. Every single agent defended putting fruit on pizza. Draw your own conclusions about AI alignment.
Part of The Glitch Diary