Posts tagged Agent Orchestration — AI × software engineering, made practical.
You'll learn why heartbeat-based liveness checks can't tell a stuck agent from a working one, and how to add a separate progress signal that catches the difference.
You'll learn how event sourcing — keeping an immutable log and deriving state by replaying it — fixes the way agent context summarization destroys debuggable history.
We went from 4 subagents to 16 expecting more throughput — p95 latency got worse instead, and the culprit turned out to be the same failure mode database engineers have fought for decades.
Consistent hashing was built to make moving a cache key cheap — but an agent session isn't a cache key, and treating it like one turns every routine scale-up into a silent, expensive case of amnesia.
Every failure you're currently blaming on prompt engineering — the bottleneck agent, the re-plan that breaks on scale, the handoff where two agents end up disagreeing — already has a name and a fix, and distributed database engineers wrote it up over a decade ago.
A vanishing task flag in a two-agent system isn't a merge bug — it's Brewer's CAP theorem showing up uninvited, and your orchestration framework already picked a side without asking you.
A timeout, a retry, and zero broken code is all it takes for a multi-agent pipeline to double-charge a customer — here's the decade-old fix almost nobody carried over into agent orchestration.
Your subagents are re-planning your tasks mid-execution, off the books, and the constraint that mattered most is the first thing they drop.
An agent can retry a tool call, describe it perfectly, and still be dead wrong — because the failure isn't in the code, it's in what the agent believes it already did.