LLM Engineering

Distributed Locking and Deadlock Prevention in Production AI Agents: Architecture, Semantic Mutexes, Leases, and Wait-For Graphs

When autonomous AI agent architectures scale from isolated single-agent loops to concurrent multi-agent fleets, systems engineering teams encounter a fundamental distributed systems reality: concurrency bugs in language models do not merely produce dirty reads. They produce reasoning corruption, circular delegation deadlocks, and cascading execution failures. In single-agent execution pipelines, control flow is strictly sequential: retrieve context, prompt the model, parse tool arguments, apply