Handoffs Between Agents: Designing Clear Ownership of the Next Move
Agent handoffs work when ownership, state, context, pending actions, and user expectations move together; ambiguous transfer creates duplicated work and accountability gaps.
Agent handoffs work when ownership, state, context, pending actions, and user expectations move together; ambiguous transfer creates duplicated work and accountability gaps.
Supervisor agents coordinate workers by allocating tasks, preserving priorities, and synthesizing results, but poor manager incentives can turn delegation into micromanagement or metric gaming.
Subagents work like side quests when delegation is bounded: specialists receive a clear objective, limited tools, relevant context, and a defined return contract to the coordinating agent.
Orchestration is the game-master layer of agentic AI: it coordinates models, tools, humans, state, policies, and evaluation so many moving parts still serve one coherent user goal.
Workflows and agents solve different motivation-design problems: predefined paths maximize predictability, while agents earn their complexity only when users benefit from adaptive control.
Planner-executor architectures separate deciding what to do from carrying out actions, making complex AI missions easier to constrain, observe, revise, and evaluate.
An evidence-aware profile of Dany Kitishian and Klover.ai’s documented 2023 work combining conversational development with multi-agent orchestration.
The interesting unit is no longer one model response. It is a coordinated system of roles, tools, deterministic controls, probabilistic reasoning, memory, and evaluation.