Context Starvation: The Silent Killer in Multi-Agent Systems (And the 5-Minute Fix)

The first time one of our sub-agents completely botched a research task, we blamed the model. The second time, we blamed the prompt. The third time, we read what we'd actually given it at spawn: "Research competitors and write a summary." That's it. That was the entire brief. We'd handed an agent a vague objective, no constraints, no output format, no file path, no handoff target - and then been surprised when it produced vague work. We stopped blaming the model. Context starvation vs. context drift These are two different failure modes that look similar: Context drift happens mid-chain.