Smart Workplace Lab

Jul 9, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence

Multi-Agent Deadlocks? Two-Step Circuit Breaker & Arbitration Protocol

The article explains how multi-agent AI systems deadlock due to circular resource dependencies, framing it as a distributed systems problem rather than a prompt engineering issue, and provides a YAML-based topology arbitration protocol with agent priorities, preempt actions, and a 3-second timeout to automatically break deadlock cycles and degrade gracefully.