Shared State & Memory

Some information needs to be shared across all agents working an engagement. The client's name, the engagement scope, the stakeholder map, the timeline, the decisions made so far. This is shared state — information that lives outside any single agent's context and is accessible to all agents who need it. Without shared state, every agent dispatch requires the coordinator to manually include engagement context in the prompt. With shared state, the coordinator references the engagement record and each agent reads what it needs.

Shared state is not shared context. Shared context means dumping the same information into every agent's prompt — which wastes tokens and dilutes focus. Shared state means maintaining a central record that agents can query selectively. CLOSER queries the stakeholder map. FORGE queries the scope document. ATLAS queries the technical requirements. Each agent reads only the slice of shared state relevant to its task. The state is shared. The context is filtered.

At Ryan Consulting, shared engagement state lives in the CRM. When I dispatch an agent for an engagement task, the prompt includes: "Engagement reference: [ID]. Query the CRM for client details, stakeholders, and relevant history." The agent reads what it needs. The coordinator does not need to copy-paste context. The state is always current because it lives in one place, not duplicated across prompts.