# Mike

- **Event:** [The Persistent Context Sprint Hackathon | Live at MongoDB .Local Build Fest](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/persistent-context-sprint-hackathon)
- **When:** Thu, Aug 13 at 12:30 – 8:00 PM (PDT)
- **Where:** Pier 48, San Francisco, CA
- **Team:** [Mike Lay](https://cerebralvalley.ai/u/mkly)
- **GitHub:** https://github.com/mkly/mongodb-unbound
- **Demo video:** https://youtu.be/_3G9WoqoRBQ
- **Gallery:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/persistent-context-sprint-hackathon/hackathon/gallery
- **Page:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/persistent-context-sprint-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/67

Blackboards are back!


The default way agents share context is a markdown scratchpad. Everyone appends, everyone re-reads the whole thing, and nothing is queryable. Chunking sucks. Unbounded replaces it with MongoDB.

Twenty small-model agents attack the same SWE-bench bug with one document store between them. No schema, no coordination protocol — just insert, find, sample, inspect.

Three things a markdown file cannot do, that we observe:

- They query instead of scanning. Agents issue more reads than writes (1.2:1), retrieving specific prior findings by filter rather than re-reading an ever-growing document. Context cost stays flat as the store grows; a markdown board's cost grows linearly with every agent's contribution.
- A schema emerges. Agents independently converged on
  analysis, solution, task, affected_with a visible synonym scatter
  (findings/current_findings, test_regence was invented, not templated. You
  can only see that because the store reports it; grep on a markdown file
  cannot.
- Structure survives concurrency. Produce documents with stable
identity and atomic updates. Twenty produce a merge conflict.

A control arm gives each agent its identical prompt, so the only variable is whether memory is shared. A lives, the operation timeline, and the emergent schema straight from Atlas

Server is still live at http://10.50.180.160:3000/

Data is light as I ran out of time for testing, but in a 3 instance test on swe-bench we created 40 documents and there were 9 submissions (not yet scored).

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Markdown version of https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/persistent-context-sprint-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/67. Site index for agents: https://cerebralvalley.ai/llms.txt · full text: https://cerebralvalley.ai/llms-full.txt