About This Version
This is the February 2026 version of The Organizational Physics of Multi-Agent AI: Substrate-Independent Dysfunction in Autonomous Software Engineering Swarms, deposited separately on Zenodo. It reports the same controlled comparison of four coordination architectures (single agent, hierarchical, stigmergic, and gated pipeline) and the two follow-up studies, formalized with Crawford-Sobel signal degradation, Goodhart's Law, and the Data Processing Inequality.
The March 2026 paper supersedes it and adds the token-level analysis of governance overhead across communication topologies and the frontier analysis of structural invariance. Read and cite the current paper; this PDF is kept for reference.