Goal drift: how a multi-agent crew ends up solving a different problem
Loop drift is one agent staying busy without getting closer to done. Hand the same failure to a crew and every agent stays busy, produces defensible work, and the team’s collective objective still ends up somewhere your original request never sent it — a genuine multi-agent goal drift failure mode, not a mistake in any single agent’s reasoning. A concrete feature-build failure, the four things that make a goal decay one handoff at a time, and what to measure so a ‘done’ check compares against the original ask instead of the nearest upstream spec.