The supervisor-blackboard pattern: coordinating multi-agent AI workflows
Most multi-agent examples keep agents isolated. Each one gets a prompt, produces output, and hands it to the next step. That works when the data flows in one direction. But some workflows need agents to build on each other’s work incrementally, reading and writing to a shared context. This is the blackboard pattern.
The idea comes from AI research in the 1970s. Multiple knowledge sources (agents) read from and write to a shared data structure (the blackboard). A control component (the supervisor) decides which agent to activate next. Each agent contributes partial results that other agents can use. The blackboard accumulates context over time.






