Two weeks ago I had six AI agents booted up in parallel on a 16GB M2 Mac mini, each one a long-running subprocess holding ~2GB resident. Within four minutes the OOM killer started reaping them. The dashboard process went next. Then WindowServer spasmed and I lost the entire desktop session. Twice. The lesson was not subtle: 16GB is not enough to run a small army of long-context LLM clients in parallel, even with everything else closed. Why the math did not work A warm-context agent subprocess idles around 1.8-2.4GB resident. Six of those alone is 10-14GB. Add macOS baseline (~6GB once you account for the kernel, WindowServer, mds, and a couple of menubar apps), and you are already past the line before the orchestrator process itself, the Discord bot pinging me, and the local dashboard get a slice. The orchestrator spawn-N-agents flag had no memory budget enforcement. It happily lit up six because that is what the config said.…