Error propagation across multi-agent systems

What the exam expects

• Return structured error context from a subagent (failure type, what was attempted, partial results, possible alternatives) instead of a generic "search unavailable".
• Distinguish access failures (a timeout that needs a retry decision) from valid empty results (a successful query with no matches), and pick the coordinator action for each.
• Recover transient failures inside the subagent and propagate only what it cannot resolve.
• Reject both anti-patterns: silently returning empty results as success, and terminating the whole workflow on one failure.
• Treat a subagent stopped by maxTurns as partial work to resume, and use structured status fields rather than scanning prose.
• Annotate synthesis output with coverage: which findings are well supported and which topic areas have gaps because sources were unavailable.

Key terms: structured error context (machine-readable failure details a coordinator can act on); access failure (the source could not be reached or read); valid empty result (the query ran and found nothing); local recovery (bounded retries inside the subagent); partial result (completed work plus what is left); coverage annotation (per-topic statement of support and gaps).

Key facts

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