Ask HN: How do swarms of AI agents work?

Andrej Karpathy posted about the growing gap in how people experience AI:

~75% have barely used LLMs ~20% use them casually ~0.2% use frontier models professionally for math and code ~0.00006% have access to frontier systems internally

He writes:

"And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics."

Source: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2109361546505966046

Does anyone have an intuition, or even firsthand experience, of how these swarms of thousands of agents actually work?

I'm already struggling to get 2-3 agents to work together reliably. I can't really wrap my head around how you'd coordinate thousands of them, or what benefits you get from scaling to that many.