Aglet

Investigate a Multi-Agent Coordination Failure

Coordination failures often appear as a plausible final answer with missing work behind it. Reconstruct the team path in order, compare messages with shared state, and identify the first divergence. Preserve individual outputs so synthesis does not erase the cause.

Build a useful investigation brief

  1. Rebuild the team trace

    Collect task, agent roles, prompts, messages, tool calls, shared state, dependencies, timing, outputs, and final synthesis. Mark inferred state and missing messages. Preserve versions and the exact scenario fixture for review.

  2. Locate the coordination split

    Compare expected and actual ownership, message content, state updates, ordering, conflict handling, and duplicate work. Identify whether the first issue was role selection, stale state, omitted handoff, disagreement, or recovery.

  3. Replay the boundary

    Change one role, message, state field, or dependency at a time. Test serial and parallel variants plus one agent failure. State whether the fault persists and whether the individual contribution or coordination contract needs correction.

What to carry forward

The investigation brief should link roles, messages, shared state, first divergence, replay, and synthesis. End with a localized coordination fault or evidence gap. Do not attribute a team failure to one agent when the handoff or shared state was undefined in the tested case.

Technical background: Agent evaluation research on arXiv.

Keep the decision with the work.

Use a Work Item in Aglet to record the problem, the evidence you have, and the next decision. Add an owner and priority, then keep updates in the discussion so the next person can follow the reasoning.

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