Vol. IV · Multi-Agent Architectures · IV.4
Handoffs and Swarm
Control transfers. The current agent returns the next agent. Context is a clean brief, not a pile of speakers. OpenAI Swarm made this obvious; the Agents SDK made it shippable.
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Doctrine
- A handoff is a routing decision plus a context rewrite. Do both explicitly.
- The receiving agent should not see the sender's tool chatter unless it needs it.
- Cycles need a cap. A triage agent bouncing with a refund agent forever is a bug.
Routines, not personalities
Swarm's 'routines' are prompts + tools + handoff list. That is enough. The Agents SDK adds guardrails and tracing. Microsoft Agent Framework injects handoff tools from a declared graph. All three agree: multi-agent is an adjacency list with an LLM picking the next node.
Anti-patterns
- Handoff that concatenates both full histories.
- Ten specialists with overlapping tools so the router cannot choose.