Your Sub-Agents Are a Distributed System. Treat Them Like One. - Girish Konda, Microsoft

Girish Konda

Talks worth your time · Courses & workshops · 2026-11-11 · 23 min · 10 pages

When an orchestrator hands work to sub-agents, you've built a distributed system, and you inherit its classic failures: half-finished work reported as success, guesses read back as facts, rate limits the orchestrator never sees, and retries that run side effects twice. Girish Konda maps each failure to the distributed-systems idea that already explains it, with examples from his open-source MCP Pacemaker and the MCP and A2A specs. He then lays out SAFE hand-offs, the consistency model he uses for sub-agents that touch real systems, including what it costs and where it doesn't fit. Girish Konda, Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com

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