Section 2

Multi-Agent Coordination Patterns

Three patterns coordinate a team of agents: a supervisor decides what the other agents do, a swarm of peers hands the conversation from one agent to the next, and a vote or debate reconciles several agents' answers to the same question. This section prices each pattern, measures the way it fails (a miscalibrated router, a handoff loop, a vote among agents whose mistakes are correlated) and gives the control that catches the failure, using Volume 8's τ-bench retail desk, the research assistant and HELM's recorded GSM8K answers.