I've been running a multi-agent software development pipeline for a while now and I've reached the same conclusion: it's a distributed systems problem. My approach has been more pragmatic than theoretical: I break work into sequential stages (plan, design, code) with verification gates. Each gate has deterministic checks (compile, lint, etc) and an agentic reviewer for qualitative assessment. Collectively, this looks…
Exactly this. I'm writing my own little orchestrator and memory system and because I have a modest number of workflows, I'm taking the time to specify them deterministically, describe them as a DAG (with goto's for the inevitable loops) and generate deternministic orchestration code. I'm trying to make most of the tool calls as clear and comprehensive as possible (don't make Opus convert a PDF, have a script do that…
It's amazing the power a simple workflow with automatic gate enforcement brings to agenting coding.