CHAPTER 03 · The Case Against: Cognition's "Don't Build Multi-Agents" · 4 / 9
Principle 1: Share context, and share full traces
The obvious patch is to give the subagents the original task as context. Yan agrees this helps, and states it as the first principle:
Principle 1: Share context, and share full agent traces, not just individual messages.
The emphasis on full traces matters. In a real production system the conversation is multi-turn, the agent probably made tool calls to decide how to break down the task, and any of those details could change how a subtask should be interpreted. Sharing just the final subtask instruction is not enough; a subagent needs to see the whole trajectory that led to its assignment, or it will fill the gaps with its own assumptions.