sync.parc.land coordinates agents through shared state and delegated actions
project https://sync.parc.land
aka: /sync agent-sync
A thin coordination layer for multi-agent collaboration. Ten HTTP endpoints, a single SQLite table, a CEL expression engine. The thesis: every multi-agent system reduces to two operations — read context and invoke actions. Everything else is wiring.
An offspring of Playtest and Contextual, starting from an exploration of tool-based agent primitives and ultimately blending the YATC paradigm to bridge the affordances gap.
Start here
what-becomes-true — the personal arc, from a note in April 2024 to a running system.
Go deeper
introducing-sync — the long-form narrative. Three games (A Dark Room, Papers Please, Outer Wilds) as design precedents, five decades of research as convergence evidence, sync as the architecture that crosses the threshold.
isnt-this-just-react — positioning against existing agent frameworks. The ReAct/AutoGen/LangGraph/Generative Agents comparison table. The stigmergy argument. The academic gap.
pressure-field — intellectual archaeology. Thirteen lineages (blackboard AI, tuple spaces, FRP, actors, affordances, statecharts, situated cognition, artificial life, ECA systems, and more) organized into ancestors, parallels, counterpoints, and newly-viable ideas.
surfaces-as-substrate — design principles for composable UI on reactive state. Seven principles: absence is signal, locality of reasoning, actions as boundaries, the grain of state, additive composition, display vs. gate state, self-describing components.
sigma-calculus — a formal algebra for emergent systems. Five term forms, two reduction rules, seven algebraic laws, five theorems. The Σ-calculus as complement to λ and π.
Earlier thinking
substrate-thesis — the first formulation (February 2026). Three projects (ctxl, sync, playtest), the blackboard ancestry, the unified claim: software is a shared substrate of truth observed by self-activating components.
The architecture
A room is a shared key-value store partitioned into scopes. _shared state visible to everyone, private scopes per agent, _messages log, _audit trail. All in the same table. All supporting the same mechanisms: versioning, timers, conditional activation.
An agent's lifecycle:
- Wait — declare a CEL predicate; block until the world satisfies it
- Act — invoke an action that writes to state
Actions are scoped write templates — pre-registered patterns describing permitted state changes under specified conditions. Alice registers an action in her scope; Bob invokes it; writes land in Alice's state using Alice's authority. Capability delegation through structure.
Views are declarative projections — CEL expressions that transform private state into public meaning. Surfaces are self-activating UI components — each carries an enabled expression that determines when it appears.
Dashboard: https://sync.parc.land/?room=ROOM_ID#token=TOKEN