Most multi-agent demos look magical for five minutes and fall apart the moment real latency, retries, and partial failure show up.
The fix is not more prompting. The fix is structure: explicit task boundaries, observable checkpoints, and narrow contracts between workers.
Three rules
First, every worker should produce an artifact, not just a sentence. Second, the orchestrator should merge results instead of guessing. Third, every external action needs a verification step.
When you design agents like distributed systems instead of theatrical chatbots, reliability jumps fast.