Handoff patterns are your agent's worst enemy, unless you implement them this way

Description and use

<p>I spent six weeks debugging a handoff that looked perfect in the trace. The planner produced a clean, well-structured plan. The executor followed it step by step. And every handoff between them lost a little bit of truth.</p> <p>Not enough to fail. Just enough to make the system slower, more expensive, and quietly wrong in ways nobody could name. I kept tuning prompts. The planner needed more detail. The executor needed clearer instructions. I upgraded the executor to a stronger model. Nothing helped, because I was diagnosing a communication problem as a reasoning problem.</p> <p>The resear

Problem

<p>I spent six weeks debugging a handoff that looked perfect in the trace. The planner produced a clean, well-structured plan. The executor followed it step by step. And every handoff between them lost a little bit of truth.</p> <p>Not enough to fail. Just enough to make the system slower, more expensive, and quietly wrong in ways nobody could name. I kept tuning prompts. The planner needed more detail. The executor needed clearer instructions. I upgraded the executor to a stronger model. Nothing helped, because I was diagnosing a communication problem as a reasoning problem.</p> <p>The resear

Outcome

<p>I spent six weeks debugging a handoff that looked perfect in the trace. The planner produced a clean, well-structured plan. The executor followed it step by step. And every handoff between them lost a little bit of truth.</p> <p>Not enough to fail. Just enough to make the system slower, more expensive, and quietly wrong in ways nobody could name. I kept tuning prompts. The planner needed more detail. The executor needed clearer instructions. I upgraded the executor to a stronger model. Nothing helped, because I was diagnosing a communication problem as a reasoning problem.</p> <p>The resear

Evidence

Handoff patterns are your agent's worst enemy, unless you implement them this way

Source