To build a useful multi-agent AI system, model the agents after your existing human team. Create specialized agents for distinct roles like 'approvals,' 'document drafting,' or 'administration' to replicate and automate a proven workflow, rather than designing a monolithic, abstract AI.

Instead of a single, general AI model that can lose context during a complex task, Protoboost uses eight distinct agents trained on specific datasets (e.g., market analysis, user needs). This architectural choice ensures each step of the validation process is more accurate and trustworthy.

Purely agentic systems can be unpredictable. A hybrid approach, like OpenAI's Deep Research forcing a clarifying question, inserts a deterministic workflow step (a "speed bump") before unleashing the agent. This mitigates risk, reduces errors, and ensures alignment before costly computation.

When building Spiral, a single large language model trying to both interview the user and write content failed due to "context rot." The solution was a multi-agent system where an "interviewer" agent hands off the full context to a separate "writer" agent, improving performance and reliability.

Long, continuous AI chat threads degrade output quality as the context window fills up, making it harder for the model to recall early details. To maintain high-quality results, treat each discrete feature or task as a new chat, ensuring the agent has a clean, focused context for each job.

To improve the quality and accuracy of an AI agent's output, spawn multiple sub-agents with competing or adversarial roles. For example, a code review agent finds bugs, while several "auditor" agents check for false positives, resulting in a more reliable final analysis.

Before ending a complex session or hitting a context window limit, instruct your AI to summarize key themes, decisions, and open questions into a "handoff document." This tactic treats each session like a work shift, ensuring you can seamlessly resume progress later without losing valuable accumulated context.

Long-running AI agent conversations degrade in quality as the context window fills. The best engineers combat this with "intentional compaction": they direct the agent to summarize its progress into a clean markdown file, then start a fresh session using that summary as the new, clean input. This is like rebooting the agent's short-term memory.

Separating AI agents into distinct roles (e.g., a technical expert and a customer-facing communicator) mirrors real-world team specializations. This allows for tailored configurations, like different 'temperature' settings for creativity versus accuracy, improving overall performance and preventing role confusion.