Consensus

You'll learn why coding agents working on the same file diverge even with no network partition, and how to design an arbitration rule so merges stop silently picking a winner.

You'll learn how gossip protocols spread state across a cluster without a central coordinator, including fanout, convergence math, and gossip-based failure detection.

Majority vote feels like triple-checking your agents, but when three instances share one blind spot, unanimous agreement is just the same wrong answer said three times — here's the asymmetric tiebreaker pattern that actually catches it.

A `sleep(random())` hack cut down on duplicate dispatch bugs but nobody could say why — turns out Raft solved this exact standoff a decade ago, and it's missing two pieces the hack never had.