Provenance, conflict and escalation

Reliability practices that keep multi-agent output trustworthy.

5 min read · Lesson 6 of 9 in this domain

Reliability in a multi-agent pipeline is mostly about not losing information that you already had. Provenance is the clearest case: the moment a synthesis step turns structured findings into prose, source, date and methodology are gone, and a downstream report agent asked for citations will invent them — not because it is unreliable, but because you deleted the answer. The same logic applies to disagreement. Two figures that differ may be a conflict or may be the same measure at different dates, and without a publication_date you cannot tell, so the system flags a contradiction where there is only change over time.

• Prose destroys metadata. If a synthesis step summarises into prose, attribution is gone and the report generator will invent sources.
• Structural fix: assign a citation_id at the earliest stage, have synthesis emit a narrative with inline markers, and pass a structured citation index alongside it.
• Distinguish temporal change from contradiction. Require publication_date in structured output, and treat differing values across distinct dates as progression. Reserve conflict detection for disagreement within the same period.
• When sources genuinely conflict, return structured objects carrying methodology, confidence and date plus a conflict_detected flag — do not average, do not pick arbitrarily, do not silently prefer the newest.
• Escalate on deterministic conditions — policy category, monetary threshold, repeat contact, explicit user request. Self-reported model confidence is not calibrated and is a named anti-pattern for routing.
• On long autonomous runs, require every progress claim to be auditable against a tool result from the same session. Unverified items must be stated as unverified.

Source: Claude Docs — Citations · Independent study aid, not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic.