The Telephone Game in Your Agent Pipeline
Here is a failure you have probably watched happen without naming it. Your orchestrator reads the user's request and briefs a worker agent. The worker runs a dozen tool calls, digests the outputs, and reports back a tidy summary. The orchestrator folds that summary into a brief for the next worker, who does the same. Five hops later, the system delivers a confident final answer — and it violates a constraint the user stated plainly in the second sentence of their request. Nobody dropped the constraint on purpose. Each hop just compressed the context a little, in a direction nobody chose, and the compressions compounded.
This is the telephone game, and multi-agent systems play it constitutively. Every handoff in your pipeline is a lossy compression step: the orchestrator's brief is a paraphrase of the user, the worker's report is a paraphrase of its tool outputs, and the final answer is a paraphrase of paraphrases. The question is not whether information gets lost — it does, measurably — but whether you have decided what is allowed to be lost, or left that decision to the sampling temperature.
