A shared workspace needs roles, not a crowd of generalists.
Each class has a defined responsibility, and the shared workspace connects their work into one continuous execution loop.
A shared workspace needs roles, not a crowd of generalists.
Shared workspace setup collaboration around three agent classes: observers, goal-oriented agents, and task-oriented agents (observers and goal-oriented agents are new). Each class has a defined responsibility, and the shared workspace connects their work into one continuous execution loop.

Source: Author
This post is a summary of my recent in-depth article (free on Substack). I have moved to The Agentic Mesh Substack (all future articles will be published in full on my Substack first, not just summaries). I hope you will subscribe to my Substack and continue to get future articles about the emerging enterprise agent ecosystem.
Role boundaries make coordination tractable. Large-scale agent systems cannot rely on every agent reading every signal and deciding independently what to do. Observer agents sense, goal-oriented agents coordinate, and task-oriented agents execute. The shared workspace gives each class a common context while preserving a clear division of responsibility.
Observer agents are the sensors of the ecosystem. They listen for external events such as news, faults, alerts, and system signals. Their job is to aggregate raw inputs, analyze them into higher-level events, and write structured signals into the shared workspace. Downstream agents consume those signals without needing direct connections to every external source.
Goal-oriented agents coordinate. Task-oriented agents act. Goal-oriented agents use the shared workspace to decompose objectives, manage execution plans, and adapt as state changes. Task-oriented agents receive those plans, identify required tools or collaborators, execute bounded steps, and write results back into the workspace. The operating loop is continuous: sense, coordinate, execute, record.
My new book, “Agentic Mesh” is now available from O’Reilly, Amazon, and wherever great books are sold.
If you liked this article then you may be interested in a few more things…
- More articles on agents on The Agentic Mesh Substack
- The Agentic Mesh Podcast channel on YouTube.
- The Agentic Mesh Podcast on Apple.
- The Agentic Mesh Podcast on Spotify.
메타데이터
- post_id
- d8df7dcf67d3
- slug
- a-shared-workspace-needs-roles-not-a-crowd-of-generalists-d8df7dcf67d3
- url
- https://medium.com/@ericbroda/a-shared-workspace-needs-roles-not-a-crowd-of-generalists-d8df7dcf67d3
- canonical_url
- https://medium.com/@ericbroda/a-shared-workspace-needs-roles-not-a-crowd-of-generalists-d8df7dcf67d3
- author_url
- https://medium.com/@ericbroda
- status
- ok
- fetched_at
- 2026-07-28 19:19:40