Multi-Agent Systems
When one objective requires genuinely different kinds of work — extraction, policy checking, drafting — that degrade each other when combined into a single agent.
Specialization is the argument for the pattern: an agent built for document extraction and one built for policy checking need different tools, prompts, and evaluation criteria. Combining them makes both worse.
The cost is coordination. Failures in multi-agent systems are usually failures of handoff rather than of individual reasoning, which is why observability across the whole run matters more than the accuracy of any single step.
What the work includes
- Decomposition of an objective into agents with distinct responsibilities
- Coordination covering planning, delegation, and reconciliation of results
- Observability over the whole run, including each agent's intent
- Checkpoints placed before irreversible steps rather than only at the start