VI · Multi-AgentMature★★

Role Assignment

also known as Persona Roles, Agent Crew, Specialist Roles

Assign each agent a named role (researcher, writer, critic, planner) with a role-specific prompt, tool palette, and acceptance criteria.

This pattern helps complete certain larger patterns —

  • used-bySOP-Encoded Multi-Agent Workflow★— Encode a human Standard Operating Procedure (roles, ordered phases, standardised hand-off artefacts) into a multi-agent pipeline so that agents communicate through structured documents rather than free-form chat.
  • specialisesDynamic Expert Recruitment·— Generate the agent team — role descriptions and instances — at run time based on the specific task, then adjust team composition between iterations based on evaluation feedback.
  • used-byCross-Domain Enterprise Agent Network★— Decompose enterprise agency into domain-specialised agents (finance, supply chain, HR, service), each grounded in its own system of record, and route artefacts between them through a standardised inter-agent protocol.

Context

A team is running several agents that contribute to a shared workflow — a content pipeline with a researcher, a writer, and a critic; a coding crew with a planner, a coder, and a reviewer — and the user, the reviewer, and the team itself need to know who produced what. Each role has its own work to do and its own definition of done.

Problem

When the agents share a generic prompt and an open tool palette, they drift toward sameness: the researcher starts writing prose, the writer starts critiquing, the critic starts proposing rewrites, and the outputs all sound alike. Contributions blur together in the transcript, review cannot focus on the right thing, and disagreement between roles — which is the signal the team wanted — never surfaces because every agent agrees with every other agent. Without explicit roles backed by scoped prompts, tools, and acceptance criteria, the multi-agent setup gives no benefit over a single agent.

Forces

  • Role definitions can ossify into bureaucracy.
  • Cross-role handoffs need typed contracts.
  • Role count multiplies prompt-engineering effort.

Example

A multi-agent content pipeline with three identical generic agents keeps producing similar bland outputs and reviewers cannot tell whose work to trust. The team gives each agent a named role with role-specific prompt and a scoped tool palette: researcher (search-only), writer (draft tools), critic (lint and policy tools). Outputs become identifiable, review focuses on the role boundary, and disagreement between writer and critic surfaces as a productive signal rather than confusion.

Diagram

Solution

Therefore:

Define each role with a system prompt naming its responsibility and constraints, a tool palette scoped to its role, and acceptance criteria for outputs it produces. Workflow assigns tasks to roles. Outputs are evaluated against the role's acceptance criteria.

What this pattern forbids. An agent operates only within its role's constraints and tool palette; cross-role action is forbidden.

The smaller patterns that complete this one —

  • generalisesCAMEL Role-Playing·— Have two agents role-play a user-assistant interaction to autonomously complete a task neither could solve alone.

And the patterns that stand alongside it, or against it —

  • complementsSupervisor★★— Place a coordinating agent above a set of specialised agents and route work to them.
  • alternative-toInner Committee★— Run one model under several distinct personas (executor, critic, planner) within a single agent loop.
  • complementsHandoff★— Transfer the active conversation from one agent to another, carrying context across the switch.
  • complementsMixture of Experts Routing★— Route each request to one or more domain-expert agents, where each expert holds deep capability in a narrow area.
  • complementsConversational Multi-Agent★— Have agents converse turn by turn until a completion criterion fires; agent roles drive the conversation forward.
  • composes-withVoting-Based Cooperation★— Finalise a decision across multiple agents by collecting and tallying their votes on candidate options, so the joint output reflects collective rather than single-agent judgement.
  • complementsGroup-Chat Manager★★— Place a dedicated manager between the participants of a multi-agent group chat that decides which participant speaks next on each turn.
  • alternative-toRole-Typed Subagents✕— Anti-pattern: pre-allocate roles (manager, coder, designer, researcher) across a fixed set of typed sub-agents and route tasks to them by role label.
  • alternative-toPersonality Variant Overlay·— Let one agent speak in several named voices that overlay the base identity rather than replacing it, so the agent can shift register without losing identity continuity or splitting into separate personas.

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Used in frameworks

References

Provenance