Building a Multi-Agent System

When one agent juggling too much starts dropping things, the fix is splitting work across several narrower agents. The real orchestration patterns, and the failure modes that come with them.

1. Why One Agent Isn't Enough A single agent juggling unrelated concerns tends to lose focus. Splitting work across specialized agents fixes that — at the cost of real coordination overhead. Both halves of that trade, honestly.
2. Orchestration Patterns Three nameable shapes for coordinating multiple agents — linear pipeline, fan-out/fan-in, and supervisor-worker — with a concrete scenario for each.
3. Failure Recovery and Guardrails What happens when a sub-agent fails, hallucinates, or loops — and the guardrails that contain it: timeouts, retry limits, output validation, and hard budget caps.