Agent Handoff Contract

Eliminate Handoff Failures in Multi-Agent Pipelines

In multi-agent systems, the most frequent failure point is the handoff. When one agent passed a "blob of prose" to another, intent gets lost, retries cause duplicate actions, and downstream agents fail because of malformed inputs. This developer-centric skill provides a formal framework for establishing Handoff Contracts between agents.

What it does

It transforms fragile agent-to-agent communication into a structured, testable, and idempotent handshake. Instead of letting agents "figure it out," this skill forces a defined schema for inputs and outputs, explicit success criteria, and stable idempotency keys to ensure retries are safe.

Why use this skill

• Prevent Duplicates: Use idempotency keys to ensure side effects (like sending emails or charging cards) only happen once.
• Fail Fast: Implement 'on_invalid' logic to catch malformed data at the source before it poisons downstream tasks.
• Testable Pipelines: Create versioned schemas that allow you to unit test individual agents in your chain.
• Framework Agnostic: Compatible with LangChain, AutoGen, CrewAI, or custom Python/Node agents.

The Output

The skill produces a structured contract definition including versioning, specific data types for input/output, validation logic, and a recovery strategy for invalid transitions. This acts as the "API Specification" for your agent interactions.