Context Handoff
This is a member-only chapter. Log in with your Signal Over Noise membership email to continue.
Log in to readModule 5 · Section 5 of 7
Context Handoff
The hardest part of multi-agent pipelines is context handoff. What does the next agent need to know that the previous agent produced?
The discipline: be explicit. Don’t assume the next agent will infer what happened in the previous stage. Pass the output clearly, with structure:
- What was the input to this stage?
- What decisions were made?
- What is the output?
- What constraints carry forward?
When newsletter-writer receives its task from content-pipeline, it gets the research brief, the outline, the voice profile reference, and explicit constraints from earlier stages. Not a summary. The actual material, structured.
Agents that receive vague handoffs produce vague output. The garbage-in problem applies across agent boundaries just as much as within a single agent.