Ghost Delegation

Problem

Sometimes a handoff just disappears: the delegated subtask is never picked up, or it enters a wait that never resolves, while the parent — having no signal that anything went wrong — eventually closes or moves on, leaving the subtask orphaned. Because nothing raised an error, no retry, timeout, or recovery path triggers; the work is simply gone, and the final result is silently incomplete. In production multi-agent systems this lost-handoff failure is a large share of observed breakdowns, and it is hard to spot precisely because there is no error to find.

Solution

Make every delegation accountable end to end. Require the receiving agent to acknowledge a handoff, so an unpicked-up subtask is detectable rather than silent, and put a timeout and an explicit completion contract on each delegated subtask so a never-resolving wait surfaces as a failure the system can act on. Track outstanding subtasks against their parent so the parent cannot close while a child is still owed, and detect orphaned work to retry or escalate it. Treat a missing result as an error condition, not as nothing — the absence of a report is itself the signal. The control is acknowledgement plus timeouts plus orphan detection, so a lost handoff becomes a recoverable event rather than a silent gap.

When to use

• Recognising this failure when a multi-agent system returns silently incomplete results with no error to trace.
• Reviewing a delegation design where handoffs are fire-and-forget with no acknowledgement or timeout.
• Diagnosing orphaned subtasks or parents that close while children are still outstanding.