Multi-agent pipelines break when two correct agents disagree on what 'done' means
ClickOk5811 · reddit · 2026-10-07
A field report on multi-agent pipeline failure: one agent gathered sources, another synthesized them into summaries. Both tested well individually, but chained together the synthesis agent kept producing summaries missing obvious points.
The root cause was mismatched implicit contracts at the handoff: the gathering agent considered its job done once it returned anything matching the query—no relevance ranking or flagging—while the synthesis agent assumed inputs were pre-filtered for relevance and weighted weak tangential sources equally with strong ones. Neither agent was malfunctioning; they operated on two different, unstated definitions of what the handoff meant, much like two services in a distributed system that each pass their own tests yet break when wired together.
The fix: explicitly define what each handoff guarantees—not just the data shape, but what claims the sender makes about it (e.g., pre-filtered, ranked). This resolved more output quality issues than any amount of tuning either agent individually.
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