Why Most Multi-Agent Systems Fail in Production (And How to Fix It)

Most multi-agent demos look impressive on stage. Then they hit production and fall apart. Here's the pattern: agents that "worked" in a Jupyter notebook start conflicting, retrying infinitely, or silently failing when other agents are involved. The root cause isn't the LLM. It's the orchestration layer. What Actually Breaks No structured handoffs — Agents pass messages as raw strings. Context gets lost. Intent gets misread. No retry strategy — When one agent fails, the whole chain stops or enter