The pass-off pattern explicitly controls what information and communication agents pass between one another during a multi-step flow. It suits complex behavior, tighter control, and communication with external agents. section 4.4.3
Use the pattern when you need to:
- Control agent-to-agent communication rather than rely only on conversational flow behavior. section 4.4.3
- Add guardrails, retries, and fallback output around intermediate agent results. section 4.4.3
- Connect to external agents while preserving more deliberate control over the flow. section 4.4.3
Guarded intermediate handoff
A research agent produces a result, a thinking agent turns it into a research plan, and a filesystem agent consumes the final output. An output guardrail checks whether the plan is sufficiently detailed; failed checks can retry up to three times before returning a fallback message.
