Relic improves team coding by turning conflicts into lasting rules
Relic: From Multi-Agent Collaboration to Persistent Organizational Capability
Artificial IntelligenceSoftware Engineering
Summary
Teams often run into problems when different people work on the same code but don't update or coordinate properly, causing mistakes. The authors created Relic, a system that helps teams turn these repeated problems into clear rules that everyone agrees to follow. These rules are not just written down—they are actively checked and can evolve as the team works. This way, lessons from past conflicts stay with the team even if members change. Tests showed Relic helps teams deliver better code with fewer errors, especially when new people join.
What this means in practice
- •For software engineering teams: Create and enforce evolving collaboration rules to reduce integration conflicts and improve software delivery quality within development teams.
- •For distributed software project managers: Use executable protocols to transfer team knowledge and maintain consistent workflow correctness despite turnover in contributors.
Authors
Hongyi Du, Tianyi Zhang, Weijia Zhang, Yi Yang, Haofei Yu, Kunlun Zhu, Tianxiang Dai, Shang Jiang, Zhelun Gao, Jiaxin Pei, Shang Zhu, Jiaxuan You
Abstract
Multiple agents may often conflict in an organization: for example, one coding agent changes an interface in a repository, but another continues to develop on the old version where existing tests become stale. A conversation can resolve the episode, but when the participants change, what makes the lesson continue to govern the team? We introduce Relic, which turns recurring collaboration failures into organization-owned, executable protocols. Members reflect on visible work, propose rules, and govern their adoption. Adopted protocols bind triggers, responsibilities, required evidence, and execution consequences to the runtime, while remaining open to revision and retirement. In one traced case, repeated integration friction produces an interface-review rule that governs later pull requests and is revised as work continues. Across 360 controlled runs over ten software workloads and three models, Relic raises complete-contract delivery from 14.06% to 19.76% (+5.71 percentage points) over a matched structured team without the protocol lifecycle, improving all four verified production endpoints in every model stratum. Under fresh-member transfer, behavioral correctness is 25.4% with no inherited protocol, 34.6% with the same rules provided as readable text, and 41.2% with executable bindings, a +6.5-point advantage over text alone. On the full CooperBench benchmark, after excluding broken benchmark pairs, Relic achieves 367/477 (76.9%), establishing the best reported result among peer-structured systems. On the fixed 48-pair same-model subset, Relic also exceeds Solo (29/48 vs. 26/48), reversing the coordination loss exhibited by the official peer baseline. Together, these results show how collaboration experience can become persistent organizational state that remains useful beyond the members who created it.