AT-301b · Module 2

Role Design Anti-Patterns

3 min read

Five anti-patterns account for 91.47% of role design failures across multi-agent systems.

The Generalist Trap: an agent defined as "handles marketing" instead of "produces weekly campaign briefs targeting enterprise accounts." Broad roles produce shallow work. The Silo: an agent with zero interface awareness — produces excellent outputs that nothing downstream can consume. The Clone: two agents with overlapping responsibilities who compete instead of collaborate. The Phantom: a role that exists in the architecture diagram but has no measurable output. The Drift: a well-designed role that silently expanded over three weeks until it now covers tasks it was never designed for.

Do This

  • Define roles at the task level, not the domain level
  • Audit role boundaries weekly — drift is silent and cumulative
  • Kill phantom roles immediately — unused agents waste system resources

Avoid This

  • Define agents by department — "the marketing agent" is a generalist trap
  • Let agents self-expand their scope — helpful agents are the worst drifters
  • Keep two agents that overlap "because they approach it differently" — that is The Clone