COORDINATION MECHANICS

EXAMPLES Example 1: A handoff in a support center. A general triage agent chats with a customer and soon determines the problem is billing-related. It stops chatting and performs a handoff to the billing agent. From that moment, the billing agent owns the conversation completely. It replies to the customer, uses billing tools like refund lookup, and the triage agent is no longer involved. The harness records "current owner: billing agent" so there is no confusion. Example 2: A subagent used as a tool. A main research agent has a tool list that includes web search, a calculator, and a tool named summarize_document. When the main agent needs a long report condensed, it calls summarize_document with the document as input. Behind the scenes, summarize_document is itself an agent that reads, reasons, and writes a summary. The main agent never sees that inner work. It simply receives the finished summary as the tool result and continues, exactly as if it had called a calculator. Example 3: Fan-out and fan-in. An analyst agent must compare five quarterly reports. It fans out five identical subagents, each assigned one report, and each returns the same structured result: revenue, costs, notable events, and any concerns. Then it fans back in. It checks that five results arrived, notices that one subagent timed out, and retries it. With all five collected, it merges them into one combined trend analysis. If two subagents disagreed about, say, whether a figure was in thousands or millions, the analyst agent would re-read the source of that figure to settle the matter. Example 4: A structured handoff object. A customer has chatted for forty messages about a double charge, with greetings, small talk, and a few corrections. Instead of sending all forty to the billing agent, the triage agent sends a tidy object with the customer ID, a one-line issue summary, and a high urgency flag. The billing agent starts with a small, clear context, acts quickly, and makes fewer mistakes than it would if it had to sort through the whole transcript. The triage agent also adds a reference to the full transcript, so the billing agent can look up details only if truly needed.