Starving Your Agents: How Poor Briefs Tank Multi-Agent Performance (And the Simple Fix)

Context starvation—starting an agent with insufficient information—is a silent killer in multi-agent systems that often gets misattributed to model or prompt failures. By adopting a structured 6-field spawn brief framework (objective, persona, constraints, output format, file path, handoff), teams can achieve dramatic output quality improvements with minimal overhead. This shift from vague directives to precise specifications directly addresses a fundamental failure mode that goes unnoticed until extensive sessions expose mediocre results.