Architecture

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.