Tool design for reliable multi-agent crews: preventing coordination failures at the tool boundary
Every fix this cluster has proposed for split-brain, goal drift, and context drift is a discipline — something an agent has to remember to do. Agents are bad at remembering and excellent at doing what a schema requires, which makes the tool boundary the cheapest place to prevent a coordination failure: a tool that cannot express a stale write cannot cause a split-brain. Concrete signatures for compare-and-set state, constraint-carrying handoffs, and staleness-aware reads — plus the three tool shapes that manufacture these failures on purpose.