Division of Labor and Handoffs
When multiple agents collaborate, what matters is not running together — it is the handoff. One agent's output becomes another's input, and the quality of the collaboration rests on that handoff point.
When human teams fail, the failure is often not in any one person but between two people — information leaks through the middle, responsibility gets stuck in the seam. Agent teams make the same mistake, and it hides better, because an agent by default will not push back and ask for clarification (unless you design it to). Hand over something slightly vague and the receiver will not frown and ask questions. It will build on the vague input exactly as given and carry the error all the way downstream.
Three Things at Every Handoff Point
Whether a handoff point is reliable comes down to three things.
The deliverable: what exactly is being handed over. Format, completeness, conventions — all explicit. A deliverable should be self-contained the way a certification-grade skill is: the receiver should never have to guess at missing premises.
The responsibility boundary: where upstream ends and downstream begins. No gray zone in between. The moment there is a stretch where each side assumes the other has it covered, that is where failures get stuck with no one claiming them.
Context transfer: the background the receiver needs, passed along without loss and without overload. Pass too little and the downstream lacks grounds for judgment; dump everything and you drown it. What gets transferred is distilled, necessary context — not the raw stream.
Problems Live at the Handoffs
Design these three as first-class citizens and the team holds together.
The common mistake is to pour all the effort into polishing individual agents and assume they will naturally cooperate once connected. But where collaboration breaks is rarely inside a single agent — it is in the handoff between two. Two excellent agents with a vague handoff still fail as a team. Two mediocre agents with clear deliverables, sharp responsibility boundaries, and clean context transfer work together remarkably well. When designing a team, watch the handoffs first.