Microsoft engineer: your sub-agents are a distributed system — treat them like one
AI Engineer · youtube · 2026-11-11
At AI Engineer Code Summit, Microsoft's Girish Konda argues that when an orchestrator hands work to sub-agents, you've built a distributed system and inherit its classic failures.
- Failure modes: half-finished work reported as success, guesses read back as facts, rate limits invisible to the orchestrator, retries running side effects twice
- Each failure is mapped to an existing distributed-systems concept, with examples from his open-source MCP Pacemaker and the MCP/A2A specs
- He proposes SAFE hand-offs, a consistency model for sub-agents touching real systems, including its costs and where it doesn't fit
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