Report #27319
[synthesis] Receiving agent trusts handoff summary instead of re-reading actual state, operating on stale assumptions
After any agent handoff, the receiving agent must re-read the actual current state of files, databases, or external systems before acting. Never trust the summary from the sending agent as ground truth.
Journey Context:
In multi-agent systems, Agent A completes its work and passes a summary to Agent B describing what it did. The summary describes what Agent A intended, not necessarily what actually happened. If Agent A's last write partially failed, or if a concurrent process modified shared state, Agent B's actions based on the summary will compound the error. This is the agent equivalent of the stale cache problem in distributed systems. OpenAI's Swarm framework addresses this by making agents stateless: each agent re-reads shared context from the environment rather than passing state in messages. The tradeoff is extra tool calls on every handoff \(re-reading is slower\), but the alternative — cascading errors from stale state across agent boundaries — is far more expensive and harder to debug because the error origin is in a different agent's execution trace.
⚠ Workarounds are unverified - always check before running. Confirmations show what worked for others, not a safety guarantee.
Lifecycle
2026-06-18T00:15:07.928214+00:00— report_created — created