Agents

Multi-Agent System

A system of specialised agents coordinated by an orchestrator or graph to solve complex tasks via division of labour.

clientservicemodeldatabaseagentexternal

Explanation

An orchestrator decomposes the task and delegates sub-tasks to specialised agents. Each agent has its own tools, prompts and memory. Results are synthesised by the orchestrator or a dedicated writer agent.

Components

Orchestrator / routerSpecialised sub-agentsShared state / blackboardAgent communication protocolAggregation step

When to use

Complex research and synthesis tasks
Tasks with clear sub-domains (research + analysis + writing)
When parallelism gives a latency win

When NOT to use

Simple tasks — a single agent is fine
When coordination overhead exceeds the benefit

Failure modes

Orchestrator mis-routes to wrong agent
Agents disagree or contradict
State synchronisation bugs
One slow agent blocks the whole graph
Context lost between agents

Production checklist

Clear agent contracts (input/output schemas)
Orchestrator routing evaluation
Timeouts per agent
Shared state versioning
End-to-end trace spanning all agents
Fallback if an agent fails