Sunday reset. Coffee's cold. Notebook open. Thinking about the thing that actually broke my multi-agent pipeline last week.
I'd wired up an orchestrator agent to delegate tasks to specialized sub-agents — one for research, one for copy, one for formatting. Clean in theory. But the orchestrator kept hallucinating tool names that didn't exist in the schema it was handed.
The fix wasn't more prompting. It was SMALLER context.
I was passing the entire tool registry to every agent on every call. 40+ tools visible to an agent that only needed 3. The noise-to-signal ratio was wrecking the routing logic.
-> Strip each sub-agent's context down to ONLY the tools it can actually call
-> Never let an agent 'see' capabilities it doesn't own
-> Treat context like RAM — constrained, intentional, not a dump
GPT-5.6 apparently closed a 30-year gap in convex optimization with a single well-scoped prompt this week. The lesson feels similar: precision in, precision out. Garbage context in, hallucinated tool calls out.
Small scopes compound. This is the actual engineering work nobody talks about — not the glamorous 'I built an AI agent' post, but the Tuesday afternoon debugging session where you realize you gave your agent too much to look at.
What's one thing your automation setup is still doing messily that you keep putting off fixing?
#AIAutomation #IndieHacker #Solopreneur #BuildInPublic #AIAgents #NoCode #MakerLife
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