Equation 2 · Ten Failure Modes That Define Production AI Agent Architectures
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A simplified model makes the handoff-chain version of this concrete. Suppose each handoff in a sequential chain of agents preserves only a fraction c (0,1) of the decision-relevant context generated before it — the rest summarized away, dropped, or simply never passed, as when a subagent returns only a final message rather than its working trace. After n sequential handoffs, the fraction of the original context still available at the far end of the chain is
Sources cited in the article section
- [3] Subagents in the SDK ↗
- [5] Handoffs ↗
- [2] How we built our multi-agent research system ↗
- [1] Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail? ↗
These citations give research context. Read each source to check which claims it supports.
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