Two coordinating coding agents finish more hard tasks than one

AgentRoom exposes claim, status and broadcast as MCP tools over a shared filesystem two coding agents work in together, per the AgentRoom paper. A CRDT merge underneath keeps their file edits from conflicting as both agents write to it.

Working alone, a single coding agent abandons up to half of hard backend tasks, often leaving a one-file stub and quitting. AgentRoom targets that failure mode for teams already running more than one coding agent on the same job.

Across five frontier coding CLIs tested on four backend tasks, two agents running AgentRoom abandoned fewer of those tasks, with less run-to-run variation.

The paper's ablation says why. Strip out the coordination tools and leave two agents plus the CRDT-merged filesystem, and the improvement disappears. Running two agents at once, or merging their edits without conflicts, doesn't cut abandonment by itself. Only visibility into what the other agent has claimed and finished does.