Glossary OTP

Coordination Failure

When agents fail not because they are bad at their individual jobs, but because they cannot work together properly. Wrong handoff, missing shared state, duplicated work, dropped tasks. The work inside each agent is fine — the space between agents is broken.

Why it matters

Most "AI failures" in production are coordination failures. The model is fine. The orchestration is not.

Related terms

Agent Handoff

When one AI agent passes a task, a piece of context, or a decision to another agent. A good handoff includes everything the rec...

Blast Radius

How much damage spreads when something goes wrong in a multi-agent system. A small blast radius means one agent fails and the o...

Shared State

Information that multiple agents need access to, stored where one agent writes and others read. Files, databases, message buses...

Build with this on OTP

If this term shows up in your playbook, it belongs in your OOS.

OTP encodes coordination intelligence so teams of humans and AI agents can run on it.

Get started Browse practices All terms →

Found an issue with this definition? Tell us and we'll fix it.