Failure Modes of Multi-Agent Systems

MAST classification: 14 failure modes in three categories (system design defects, agent consistency failures, lack of execution checking). Simple fixes give only ~15% improvement – these are fundamental architectural defects, not bugs. Agent failure is Byzantine in nature: it doesn’t stop, but outputs plausible but incorrect conclusions. Two engineering modes: competing conflicts in a shared filesystem (lost update – cured by optimistic version locking; semantic conflicts between files – harder) and cascading error amplification (“broken telephone” – error grows consistency through several agents; cured by cross-checking and deterministic external feedback).

Related: [Multi-agent vs single-agent], [Filesystem in multi-agent systems], [Orchestration model]