A context engineer is building a multi-agent Databricks workflow where an orchestrating agent coordinates five sub-agents, each performing document analysis, entity extraction, and summarization tasks. The orchestrator receives the complete raw output from each sub-agent, including intermediate reasoning chains, extracted entity lists, and status messages, and appends all of it to its running context window before issuing follow-up instructions. After scaling to production document volumes, the orchestrator's context window consistently saturates before all sub-agent results are processed, causing truncation errors and a loss of task coherence.
Which two changes to sub-agent output design would reduce the orchestrator's context load while preserving the information it needs to continue coordinating tasks?
Choose two
The orchestrator is suffering from context saturation because sub-agents return excessive intermediate information rather than concise, actionable results.
Option A introduces structured output contracts that restrict each sub-agent's response to essential coordination information. These records should include execution status, extracted entities, confidence scores, and relevant task identifiers.
Removing verbose intermediate reasoning and redundant status messages substantially reduces the context consumed by each agent response.
Option E complements this approach by moving complete sub-agent outputs into persistent storage backed by Lakebase. Instead of transferring large documents and intermediate results through the orchestrator's prompt, sub-agents can return identifiers referencing their stored outputs.
A practical implementation combines both approaches: the orchestrator receives a concise structured summary and a reference to the complete underlying result.
When additional evidence is required, the orchestrator can retrieve the relevant stored information selectively.
Databricks supports multi-agent orchestration and Lakebase-backed persistent agent state. These capabilities enable application-specific designs that separate active context from durable execution artifacts.
Option B reduces available specialization, while Option C merely increases capacity without resolving inefficient information transfer. Option D abandons the existing multi-agent architecture and may recreate the original context-saturation problem.
The selected design improves scalability while maintaining access to detailed results and supporting evidence.
Official Databricks reference: Build a multi-agent system on Databricks Apps, Agent state and memory, and Tracing overview.