Atomic claims stop AI agents from repeating each other's jobs, simulation finds

A simulation run on 2026-11-13 showed that multi-agent systems can waste work when agents check a shared task list and then mark a job as taken in separate steps. Uncoordinated workers duplicated about 15 of 30 jobs per trial on average, while an atomic claim that combines the check and the mark produced no duplicates across 100 trials. The approach pairs each claim with a time-limited lease, so a job held by a crashed agent is released and finished by another within about 650 virtual milliseconds on average. A single dispatcher also eliminated duplicates in the test. The author notes that leases reduce duplicates but cannot fully rule them out, since an agent may pause and lose its claim.