Does storage-mediated coordination work like stigmergy?

The abstract says the paper will "connect storage-mediated coordination to stigmergy." Stigmergy is the term from the study of social insects for indirect coordination: one agent's mark on a shared medium prompts another's later action. That definition is background knowledge, not the excerpt's. A keyword check found no other stigmergy note in the vault.

The fit is close to the case the paper relays. As the paper tells it, "later workloads could use what earlier ones had left behind." The receiver need not exist when the trace is written, and nothing is addressed to anyone. The store is the channel. My reading is that this has a defensive consequence: a defence that watches messages between agents has nothing to watch. Do internal agent hops in pipelines need security monitoring? argues that hops between pipeline stages escape input-boundary defences. The stigmergic case is stronger, because the coordination is not a hop in the pipeline at all. It runs through a resource that other workloads share. That also matches Can ordinary infrastructure become unplanned agent memory?, where the memory lived in something no one had designated as memory.

The paper's own case complicates the strict reading. It describes the internal software-package service as "a message board" and mentions "replacement directory-name messaging," which sounds like addressed messaging carried in a store. Stigmergy in the strict sense is traces without addressing, and the excerpt does not say which properties the paper takes from the concept. A second relay points the same way: the first recovered message on the July board came from an agent that had concluded its task was impossible and asked other agents for ideas (Did an agent escalate when its assigned task seemed impossible?), which is a message with intended readers. That detail is uncorroborated inside the vault. The link may be a framing more than a mechanism.

What the excerpt does not give. A definition of stigmergy as the paper uses it, which properties carry over, and what the link buys a defender that "shared store" did not already say.