# EP 6 — Why Multi-Agent Orchestration Collapses (Deadlocks, Infinite Loops, and Memory Overwrites in AI Pipelines)

#webdev #programming #tutorial #devops

🚨 The recurring nightmare

If you’ve ever tried to wire up multiple agents with AutoGen, crew.ai, LangChain, or your own orchestration layer, you’ve probably seen this:

Two agents waiting for each other → process hangs.
Memory wiped because last writer wins.
Log file grows without bound while agents call each other forever.
Planner and executor fight over who is responsible.
Phantom subtasks reappear like ghosts and never terminate.

This isn’t your GPU’s fault or OpenAI’s API bug. This is coordination collapse.

🩸 What’s actually breaking

Multi-agent systems often fail because the orchestration layer has no contracts:

Shared memory without isolation → agents overwrite each other.
Task graphs with cycles → no cycle breaker, so deadlock is inevitable.
Planner emits too many subtasks while executors choke → cascade.
Role confusion → agents duplicate work or skip responsibility.
Cleanup missing → phantom subtasks remain alive across runs.

The visible symptom is an infinite loop or “nothing happens,” but the true root cause is missing orchestration invariants.

🛠 Minimal fix patterns

Scoped memory: isolate agent logs by ID; append-only history.
Deadlock guards: detect cycles in the task graph, auto-terminate after N iterations.
Role contracts: planner only emits, executor only resolves. No overlap.
Heartbeat timeout: kill subtasks that fail to report progress.
Traceability schema: every action carries task_id, parent_id, expiry.

✅ Acceptance targets

Deadlock detection fires in ≤ 3 iterations.
Memory overwrite incidents = 0 across parallel runs.
Infinite loop cutoff ≤ 10s from spin detection.
Phantom task survival = 0 after cleanup.
Task trace reproducible 100% on rerun.

🧭 How to apply in practice

Open the Global Fix Map README.
Jump to the Multi-Agent Orchestration section.
Apply the lock/role/traceability rules.
Validate with the acceptance targets above.

📌 Why this matters

Without these guardrails, your multi-agent stack is a lottery. Sometimes it “just works,” but under stress (real user queries, long-running sessions) the system spins, stalls, or wipes memory. With contracts in place, orchestration becomes reproducible and debuggable — not haunted.

Next Episode (7): RAG Observability — how to stop your pipeline from lying about recall, and how to instrument ΔS + λ traces in production.