In Episode 1 we looked at the big picture: why patching after generation keeps failing, and how a reasoning firewall flips the stack to fix-before-generate.
Today we zoom into one of the most failure-prone layers:
Agents & Orchestration.
When multiple agents, tools, or roles start interacting, the orchestration layer quietly becomes the weakest link. Most “it worked in demo but failed in prod” stories come from here.
👉 Full index here:
Global Fix Map README
Symptoms you might recognize
- Agent forgets its role, starts leaking instructions across boundaries.
- First call after idle time produces garbage output.
- Agent loops tool calls endlessly, or calls the wrong tool.
- One agent fails → whole system stalls.
- Multi-agent setups hang in deadlock.
These are not model errors — they’re orchestration failures.
What’s actually breaking
Under the hood, the issues almost always trace back to missing contracts:
- No stable role ID schema across retries.
- Session anchors missing when state resets.
- No tool call fences (input contract + timeout).
- No recovery bridges between agents, so one stall cascades.
- No deadlock prevention in multi-agent orchestration.
When these contracts aren’t enforced, things look fine in single-turn demos but collapse under production load.
Minimal fixes
Here’s what stops the bleeding with minimal infra:
- Assign stable role IDs and enforce schema in prompts.
- Add a reset-on-drift rule: ΔS > 0.6 → auto re-init the agent role.
- Wrap tool calls with fences: define input contract + timeout.
- Insert recovery bridges: if an agent stalls, reroute or compress tasks.
- For multi-agent systems, use explicit lock ordering or token-passing to prevent deadlock.
How to validate
The acceptance targets are the same as Episode 1:
- ΔS ≤ 0.45 on all role checks.
- Coverage ≥ 0.70 on orchestration traces.
- λ states converge reliably under retries.
If your traces show drift above these thresholds, orchestration isn’t stable yet.
Why this matters
Fixes at this layer don’t just make agents “work better.”
They eliminate recurring orchestration bugs — the kind that resurface every deploy.
Instead of firefighting the same failure modes, you fix once and it stays fixed.
Next up
Episode 3: Automation guardrails
(covering Zapier, n8n, GitHub Actions, idempotency fences).
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