Multi-Agent Failure Modes

Everyone publishes multi-agent architecture diagrams. Almost nobody publishes failure post-mortems. This is a problem for the industry: teams building multi-agent systems are repeatedly encountering the same failure modes, with no shared body of knowledge about what those failure modes look like in production or how to address them.

Cognition AI's "Don't Build Multi-Agents" post is the most widely shared piece of content in the agentic AI space because it is honest about failure. This whitepaper is the operational counterpart: not a recommendation against multi-agent systems, but a detailed taxonomy of the failure modes Tenten AI has observed across production deployments, with specific architectural mitigations for each.

The target reader is a senior engineer or technical lead who has built or is building a multi-agent system and wants to understand what can go wrong before it goes wrong in production.