Water-Town: The Agent Swarm Data Stack

A thought experiment proposing 'Water Town,' a Gas Town-inspired framework for managing AI agent swarms in data workflows. The post outlines 8 progressive stages of AI adoption for both analysts (from AI-assisted SQL to automated insights) and data engineers (from autocomplete to self-healing pipelines). It then defines a multi-agent architecture with five specialized roles — Lookouts (data quality), Carpenters (pipeline repair), Scribes (context management), Captains (orchestration), and Navigators (insight generation) — coordinating via Observations, Orders, Flags, and Regulations. The piece explores how analytics and data engineering roles converge as agentic systems mature, and raises the philosophical question of whether analytics is even necessary in a fully autonomous, human-free data world.