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Learning objectives
- Recognize useful supervisor, specialist, and evaluator patterns
- Define contracts and shared state between agents
- Evaluate whether added coordination produces a real advantage
Prerequisites
Agent loops · Tool use · Evaluation basics
Answer first
Canonical definition
A multi-agent system coordinates multiple model-driven workers with separate roles, context, or tools through explicit contracts and shared orchestration.
Operating context
Why it matters
Separate agents can isolate context and permissions or parallelize independent work, but every handoff adds latency, cost, and a new failure boundary.
Role-play alone is not architecture; each agent should have a distinct mandate that can be tested independently.
Method
Step by step
- 01
Prove the split
Name the context, permission, ownership, specialization, or parallelism benefit that one agent cannot provide cleanly.
- 02
Define contracts
Specify task request, evidence, output schema, confidence, error states, and who may retry or reject a handoff.
- 03
Centralize control
Keep budgets, policy, state, and termination in deterministic orchestration rather than distributed negotiation.
- 04
Compare the baseline
Evaluate the multi-agent design against a single-agent or workflow baseline for quality, cost, latency, and operability.
Hands-on lab
Add an evaluator agent carefully
Separate output generation and rubric-based review while keeping final release under a deterministic gate.
Deliverable
Two role specs, a handoff schema, disagreement policy, shared trace, and baseline comparison.
What breaks
Common failure modes
- F1Creating many personas that share the same model, context, and permissions
- F2Allowing agents to recursively delegate without a global budget
- F3Using an agent to evaluate criteria that deterministic checks could enforce
Beyond the demo
Production notes
- Trace each agent separately and preserve correlation IDs across the full run.
- Restrict credentials per role so a specialist cannot silently inherit the supervisor's authority.
Further reading
Sources
Related Tenten resources