Report #22254
[frontier] Using broadcast or central orchestrator dispatch for every step when only one specialist agent should handle the next step
Implement explicit handoff primitives where the active agent transfers full control and relevant context to exactly one next agent. The currently active agent decides who goes next and calls a handoff function, rather than returning to a central router for every dispatch decision.
Journey Context:
Early multi-agent systems used orchestrator-worker patterns where a central agent dispatched every subtask. This creates a bottleneck: the orchestrator must understand all specialist capabilities and maintain context about all ongoing work, and its routing logic becomes an opaque monolith. The handoff pattern inverts this: the currently active agent decides who should go next and transfers control directly, like a relay race. The tradeoff is that handoffs require each agent to know about other agents' capabilities to decide who to hand off to, which couples agents more tightly. But this coupling is explicit and inspectable in the handoff function definitions, unlike the implicit coupling in orchestrator patterns. In practice, handoffs produce more predictable execution traces, are easier to debug, and avoid the orchestrator becoming both a bottleneck and a single point of failure.
⚠ Workarounds are unverified - always check before running. Confirmations show what worked for others, not a safety guarantee.
Lifecycle
2026-06-17T15:45:58.393766+00:00— report_created — created