cva-patterns-workflows

Multi-agent orchestration connects 3+ agents through topology patterns—sequential, parallel, or DAG—with state management (stateless, stateful, or hybrid) and reliability features like retries with exponential backoff and circuit breakers for external APIs, ensuring consistent results across Clojure and Vertex AI environments.

Parallel topology design identifies independent agent steps and executes them concurrently rather than sequentially, achieving significant latency reduction—demonstrated by 32% improvement—while managing intermediate state and coordinating results across the workflow.

Error handling combines per-system retries with exponential backoff and circuit breakers for external APIs, while monitoring captures latency, cost, and tokens-per-agent metrics to optimize performance and detect failures before they propagate through the pipeline.

Yes, this Skill applies to Clojure and Vertex AI environments specifically, supporting all topology and state management patterns with functional requirements for retry logic, fallbacks, and observability across your multi-agent system.

State management strategy depends on your pipeline's needs: stateless minimizes complexity, stateful preserves intermediate results for recovery, and hybrid balances both—the Skill supports all three approaches for different reliability and performance trade-offs.

Circuit breakers prevent cascading failures by stopping requests to failing APIs, while exponential backoff retries give services time to recover; optional fallbacks route work to alternative agents, ensuring the pipeline degrades gracefully rather than halting.