Timeless Tech to Modern Magic: Building Multi-agent Systems with Finite State Machines

My talk at Code Freeze at the University of Minnesota, 2025
The theme of the conference was "Back to the Future," applying core concepts and "tried and true" practices to future software engineering challenges.
I believe my talk, "Timeless Tech to Modern Magic: Building Multi-Agent Systems with Finite State Machines," nailed the theme almost too perfectly. I shared how 1950s technology (the finite state machine) can be used to orchestrate LLMs and build the hottest 2025 tech du jour-AI Agents.
One of my goals for this talk was to cut through the hype. It is a challenge to understand what an AI agent is and especially how to practically build these types of applications. I hope that seeing common agentic patterns through the clarifying lens of state charts will help those trying to understand this technology better--people like me.
(Slide deck: lnkd.in/giCDqmyP)
In this talk I cover briefly what a state machine and actor are and how they can be used to implement common agentic patterns like tool use, feedback, collaboration, orchestration, and a new one I made up: agent chartering--LLMs have sucked up 70 years of state chart diagrams and are amazingly good at both understanding state charts visually and generating state machine code.
In my demo, Red vs Blue, I present each of the agentic patterns above and explore the many advantages state machines bring to the security-minded operator. (Starts at 35:00)
If you have any feedback or questions about my talk, please reach out on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.c....