Theo Mercer is the editorial pen name used for research and historical synthesis published by the CodeHistory Research Desk. Articles are sourced, reviewed, and revised according to CodeHistory’s published research standards.
How Victor Lesser’s work on distributed AI, coordination and the organization of complex AI systems helped establish the intellectual foundations of multi-agent systems.
How Katia Sycara and the RETSINA project turned multi-agent theory into reusable infrastructure for heterogeneous, cooperating software agents.
How Michael Wooldridge helped formalize multi-agent systems as a field concerned with interacting intelligent agents, their organization and their logic.
How Nick Jennings helped turn multi-agent systems into an engineering discipline with work on coordination, negotiation and real-world agent applications.
How Yoav Shoham helped connect artificial intelligence, game theory and the formal study of strategic interaction among multiple agents.
How AutoGen turned multi-agent conversation into a flexible programming framework for LLM applications in 2023.
How CAMEL’s March 2023 paper explored autonomous cooperation through role-playing conversations between large-language-model agents.
How ChatDev modeled software development as a sequence of conversations among specialized LLM agents for design, coding and testing.
How MetaGPT encoded software-development workflows as standard operating procedures for specialized LLM agents in 2023.
Before Andrej Karpathy gave 'vibe coding' its name in 2025, Klover.ai was documenting a conversational Co-Creator approach to software development. The evidence is strongest when the practice, the later label, and the competing dates are kept distinct.