The Agent Orchestration Problem Nobody Talks About

Everyone building agents eventually hits the same wall: one agent calls another, which calls another, and suddenly you have a chain of models all hallucinating off each other. Its the telephone game, but every participant is confidently making things up. The naive approach that fails: Agent A extracts data. Agent B summarizes. Agent C formats. Agent D sends. Each step compounds error. By the time Agent D acts, the original intent has mutated beyond recognition. This is why most multi-agent demos work great in controlled scenarios but fall apart in production. What actually works: The fix isnt smarter models. Its grounded handoffs. Structured state, not natural language. Agents should pass JSON schemas or typed objects, not paragraphs of text. Natural language is lossy. Structured data is verifiable. Single source of truth. All agents read from and write to the same context object. No telephone chains. Each agent sees the canonical state. Explicit failure modes. If Agent B receives garb