ViBe

When you're running multiple AI agents, the question of which one handles which work is deceptively tricky. This episode breaks down the routing problem — and why fixing it starts with how you define agent scope, not how you sort incoming tasks.

Show Notes

Running two or three AI agents inside a business feels manageable — until work starts falling into the gaps between them. This episode of ViBe tackles the routing problem head-on: not as a technical puzzle, but as a structural one that gets harder every time you add a new agent to the mix. If you've ever found yourself making the same manual judgment call about which agent should handle something, this episode explains why that keeps happening and what to do about it.

The episode works through the problem from first principles, covering:

  • Why the routing problem compounds: each new agent creates new borders, and those borders multiply faster than the agents themselves.
  • The limits of a "router" agent: sorting clear cases is straightforward, but ambiguous ones still require business context that a routing layer doesn't have.
  • Capabilities vs. scope: writing agent instructions as a list of things an agent can do leaves edge cases unresolved — defining what an agent owns, including where its responsibility starts and ends, is what makes routing automatic.
  • Boundary protocols: when two agents share a border, that handoff needs to be written into the instructions explicitly — not held in someone's head — so it runs the same way every time.
  • Mapping before adding: drawing out existing agent responsibilities as a kind of org chart reveals where current time is being lost to gaps, and whether the fix is a protocol, a scope expansion, or a genuinely new agent.

The practical framing here applies whether you're running workflow automation across departments, building out custom internal tools that agents work within, or scaling toward a fuller business operating system where software and agents are built around how your business actually runs. The routing problem is one of the quieter scaling challenges, but it's one of the first ones worth solving deliberately.

For more on handing off work to agents without losing control of outcomes, listen to The Delegation Gap: What You Hand Off to an Agent Versus What You Actually Mean. And if you want to see what your current tooling might be costing you compared to building your own, the savings calculator is a good place to start.

VB.co

What is ViBe?

Building the connective tissue of a modern business software stack — shared identity, module boundaries, tenancy models, and the integration decisions that are cheap now and expensive later.

Each episode takes one architectural decision — where a tenant boundary belongs, how modules should hand off a signed-in user, what to share and what to duplicate — and reasons through the consequences a year out. Written for platform engineers and architects designing systems other teams will build on. Five or six minutes, one decision, no framework advocacy.

Topics include tenancy models and boundaries, shared identity and single sign-on between modules, what to share versus duplicate, module contracts and versioning, migration paths, and integration decisions that are cheap now and expensive later.

Produced by ViBe. Full details, services and further reading at https://vb.co