Agent Designer - Multi-Agent System Architecture

A toolkit for designing, architecting, and evaluating multi-agent systems. It provides structured approaches to agent architecture patterns, tool design principles, communication strategies, and performance evaluation frameworks for building robust, scalable AI agent systems.

Core Capabilities

• Architecture pattern selection — single agent, supervisor, swarm, hierarchical, and pipeline patterns with use-case fit and trade-offs.
• Agent role definition — identity, responsibilities, capabilities, interfaces, and constraints; common archetypes (coordinator, specialist, interface, monitor).
• Tool design — schema design, error handling, idempotency requirements, and validation rules.
• Communication & orchestration — message passing, shared state, event-driven architecture; centralized, decentralized, and hybrid orchestration.
• Guardrails & safety — input validation, output filtering, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints.
• Evaluation frameworks — task completion, quality, cost, and latency metrics with bottleneck analysis.
• Memory, scaling & failure handling — short/long/shared memory, horizontal/vertical scaling, retries, fallbacks, and circuit breakers.

When to Use

• Building AI agent systems or designing multi-agent workflows.
• Creating tool schemas for OpenAI function calling or Anthropic tool use.
• Selecting an architecture pattern for a new system.
• Evaluating agent performance from execution logs.

Clarify First

Before designing the system, confirm these inputs. If any is unknown or vague, ASK — do not assume:

• ] System goal & scale — the task the agents perform and expected load (drives which architecture pattern: single, supervisor, swarm, hierarchical, or pipeline)
• ] Tool protocol target — OpenAI function calling vs Anthropic tool use (sets the schema format tool_schema_generator.py emits)
• ] Optimization priority — cost, latency, or quality (determines agent roles, model tiers, and which metrics the evaluator weights)

Stop rule: ask only the 2-3 that most change the output. If the user says "just draft it," proceed and list your assumptions at the top of the artifact.

Tools

| Tool | Purpose | Command | |------|---------|---------| | agent_planner.py | Design architecture from requirements (pattern, roles, topology, Mermaid diagram, roadmap) | python agent_planner.py requirements.json -o my_system --format both | | agent_evaluator.py | Evaluate performance from execution logs (success, cost, latency, bottlenecks) | python agent_evaluator.py execution_logs.json -o perf_report --format both --detailed | | tool_schema_generator.py | Generate OpenAI/Anthropic tool schemas with validation | python tool_schema_generator.py tools.json -o my_tools --format both --validate |

References

Load the reference that matches the task — keep this file lean and pull detail on demand:

• references/core-capabilities.md — the full Core Capabilities catalog (architecture patterns, role definition, tool design, communication, guardrails, evaluation, orchestration, memory, scaling, failure handling) plus Implementation Guidelines. Read when designing any part of a system.
• references/agent_architecture_patterns.md — deep catalog of architecture patterns with structure diagrams, characteristics, use cases, and implementation considerations. Read when selecting or comparing patterns.
• references/tool_design_best_practices.md — best practices for designing tools in multi-agent systems (single responsibility, idempotency, composability, schemas, error handling). Read when designing tools or schemas.
• references/evaluation_methodology.md — full evaluation methodology across performance, reliability, cost, and satisfaction dimensions. Read when planning evaluation or interpreting reports.
• references/troubleshooting-and-tool-reference.md — troubleshooting table, success criteria, and the complete CLI parameter reference for all three scripts. Read when a tool misbehaves or you need full command options.

Scope & Limitations

Covers:

• Multi-agent architecture pattern selection (single agent, supervisor, swarm, hierarchical, pipeline)
• Agent role definition with responsibilities, capabilities, tools, and communication interfaces
• Tool schema generation in OpenAI and Anthropic formats with validation rules and error handling
• Performance evaluation from execution logs including bottleneck analysis and optimization recommendations

Does NOT cover:

• Runtime agent orchestration or execution engines (see engineering/agent-workflow-designer for workflow execution)
• LLM prompt engineering or system prompt design (see engineering/prompt-engineer-toolkit)
• MCP server implementation or protocol details (see engineering/mcp-server-builder)
• Self-improving agent feedback loops or autonomous learning (see engineering/self-improving-agent)

Integration Points

| Skill | Integration | Data Flow | |-------|-------------|-----------| | engineering/agent-workflow-designer | Workflow definitions consume architecture designs from Agent Designer | Agent roles and communication topology feed into workflow step definitions | | engineering/prompt-engineer-toolkit | System prompts are crafted per agent role defined by Agent Designer | Agent role specifications and responsibilities inform prompt structure and constraints | | engineering/mcp-server-builder | Tool schemas generated here map to MCP server tool implementations | tool_schema_generator.py output provides the schema contract that MCP servers implement | | engineering/self-improving-agent | Evaluation reports feed into self-improvement loops | agent_evaluator.py bottleneck analysis drives autonomous optimization decisions | | engineering/observability-designer | Monitoring architecture aligns with agent topology and communication links | Agent definitions and communication patterns define what to instrument and alert on | | engineering/agent-protocol | Protocol standards govern inter-agent message formats designed here | Communication topology patterns must comply with agent protocol specifications |