multi agent

Multi-agent is the most over-prescribed architecture in the industry. A staff-level answer is a decision framework driven by task structure and context limits, with the orchestration failure modes named before the interviewer asks.

You cannot unit-test a stochastic two-agent pipeline with a golden output. You evaluate it the way you stress a distributed system: thousands of simulated runs, controlled fault injection, and a judge calibrated against humans.

The hard parts are not the four roles. They are the communication substrate, a termination condition that is not just a retry cap, and stopping the Coder from forgetting the ticket after five repair cycles.

Five LLM agents over a hundred steps, and the bar is zero contradictions with a 500-page contract. The real test is the state and grounding layer, not the agent prompts.

When agents call agents, one agent's output is another's untrusted input, and a single injected instruction can propagate across the whole graph with accumulated privileges. The strong answer treats every inter-agent edge as a trust boundary and bounds privilege per agent, not per system.