I'm Robert, a Member of Technical Staff at Chroma. I've been working on transaction protocols for at least 14 years now, starting with my PhD in distributed systems. During my tenure at Dropbox, where I worked on the metadata layer for storing non-filesystem data, we added transactional support to Edgestore, the storage system for the same.
Agents fascinate me. With agents, we have real reason to question the fundamental tradeoffs we've made with software. Coding agents build differently, communicate differently, and thus need different solutions than engineers have built in the past.
We've built a new context layer for organizations called Foundation. With Foundation, we treat the agents as a distributed system and use techniques from the literature to guide the swarm effectively.
At the heart of Foundation sits some novel distributed systems work we call the Fission protocol, documented in this post. In short, breaking atomicity of transactions is encouraged and necessary.
I'll be here to answer any questions you have about the post.
Happy hacking, Robert