The coordination patterns are well understood. The protocol layer is converging. The unsolved problem is context: how do you decide what to pass between agents, when to summarize versus delegate in full, and how to do this without the routing decision itself becoming the expensive part. This post lands the thesis — and examines what happens when agents coordinate asynchronously across disconnected environments.
The synchronous coordination patterns tell you how to decompose work. This post covers what happens when that work goes wrong — or when agents don’t yet know who can help. Iterative refinement, progressive discovery, fallback, and speculative execution are the patterns that govern self-correction, capability negotiation, and graceful degradation in production agent systems.
Multi-agent systems are not a new class of engineering problem. They are distributed systems with a different payload. This post maps the synchronous coordination patterns emerging in agent ecosystems — delegation, handoff, scatter-gather, chaining — to the primitives distributed systems engineers have used for decades, and explains why the medium changes the failure modes in ways that matter.