Handoffs between agents
Work does not always finish with the agent that started it. One agent triages, another drafts, a third writes the outcome back. The handoff between them is where context goes to die if you are not careful, in exactly the way it dies when a human queue passes work around with no notes.
Getting agent-to-agent handoffs right is the same discipline as getting human escalation right, applied inside the machine.
Context is the payload
When one agent hands to another, what travels is not just the task, it is everything the first agent learned. The account, the history, what has already been tried, why this step is happening. A handoff that passes the task but drops the context forces the next agent to rediscover what the last one already knew.
This is the same mistake as the bad human escalation, and it is just as expensive. The second agent starting from zero is wasted work, and worse, it can reach a different conclusion because it is missing what the first one saw.
One record, many hands
The thing that keeps handoffs honest is that they all write to the same record. A piece of work moving through three agents is one logged thread, not three disconnected actions. Anyone reviewing it sees the whole chain: who did what, in what order, and why it moved.
That shared record is what stops a multi-agent flow from becoming a black box. The work passing between agents is as auditable as a single agent's action, because it is all the same trail.
Handoffs need boundaries too
Each agent in a chain keeps its own scope. Handing work from one to another does not pool their permissions. The triage agent that can read everything does not lend that reach to the action agent it hands to. Each link in the chain is bounded exactly as it would be alone.
This matters because a chain is only as safe as its widest permission. Keeping scopes separate across a handoff means the flow's worst case is still bounded, rather than quietly becoming the sum of everything any agent in it could do.
Design the seams
The seams between agents are where multi-agent systems succeed or fail, so they deserve as much attention as the agents themselves. A clean handoff carries full context, writes to the shared record, and respects each agent's scope. A sloppy one loses the thread and blurs the boundaries.
Design the seams well and a chain of narrow agents can handle work no single agent should. Design them badly and you have built a confusing pile that is harder to audit than the manual process it replaced.
Where it leaves the team
The people who used to spend the morning triaging spend it on the handful of things that genuinely needed a person. The repetitive work is handled and recorded. What is left is the harder work, which is the work most teams would rather be doing anyway.