Protocol Debugging

When an agent produces incorrect output, the root cause is frequently not the agent — it is the message it received. Protocol debugging traces the message chain backward from the bad output to the root cause. The correlationId is the thread that connects the chain.

The debugging protocol: start at the failed output. Pull the message that triggered the producing agent's work. Validate the payload against the schema — was the input well-formed? Check the envelope — was the priority correct, was the TTL sufficient, was it delivered to the right agent? Trace the correlationId backward to the originating request. At each hop, validate schema compliance and check for transformation errors. In our system, 62.17% of "agent errors" trace back to message-layer issues: malformed payloads, priority misrouting, expired TTLs, or schema mismatches between sender and recipient versions.

1. Identify the Failed Output Start at the symptom. Which agent produced incorrect output? What specifically is wrong with it? The error description narrows the search — a formatting error points to payload schema issues; a factual error points to upstream data quality.
2. Trace the Message Chain Pull the correlationId from the output artifact. Walk backward through every message in that chain. At each hop: validate the payload, check the envelope, verify delivery timing. The root cause is usually within 3 hops of the failure.
3. Fix at the Source Fixing the symptom at the failing agent is a band-aid. Fix the message-layer issue that caused the bad input. Update the schema, recalibrate the routing, tighten the validation. Then re-run the message chain to verify the fix propagates correctly.