Missions: Multi-Agent Systems That Ship for Days — Luke Alvoeiro, Factory
From AI Dot Engineer
Everyone's building multi-agent systems, but nobody agrees on how. This talk proposes a taxonomy of five frontier multi-agent strategies and shows what happens when you compose them into a single architecture. Drawing from production data at Factory, we walk through a three-role system (orchestrator, workers, validators) that uses validation contracts, structured agent handoffs, and adversarial verification. We cover the case for serial over parallel execution, why model selection per role is a compounding advantage, and how to design systems that get better with each model generation instead of being made obsolete by them.
Speaker info: - https://github.com/lukealvoeiro - https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukealvoeiro
Timestamp: 0:00 Introduction to multi-agent systems and the bottleneck of human attention 1:50 Taxonomy of five frontier multi-agent frameworks 4:04 Introducing 'Missions': The three-role architecture (Orchestrator, Workers, Validators) 6:34 The importance of validation contracts for consistent quality 8:09 Maintaining long-term context through structured handoffs 9:17 The case for serial execution over parallel execution 10:30 Mission control: Monitoring agent progress 11:22 Strategic model selection per role ('Droid whispering') 13:06 Production data analysis: Building a Slack clone 14:34 Designing systems that improve with each model generation 15:51 Conclusion: The shifting economics of software engineering
Read this with one question in mind: what would I change in my work tomorrow if I took this seriously?