Assess agent ecosystem health by checking three pair-level…

When This Fires

• During periodic agent system health reviews (monthly or quarterly)
• When the system "isn't working" despite individual agents functioning well — pair-level issues are likely
• When adding a new agent to an existing system — check its interactions with all existing agents
• Complements Define non-overlapping agent scopes — scope collisions… (scope design) and Resolve inter-agent conflicts with documented priority… (conflict resolution) with the diagnostic that identifies which pairs need intervention

Common Failure Mode

Assessing agents individually: "My writing agent is working. My exercise agent is working. My review agent is working." All true — but the writing agent and exercise agent compete for the same morning block, and the review agent's output backlog keeps growing because the writing agent produces faster than review can process. Pair-level assessment reveals these interactions.

The Protocol

(1) List all active agents. For each pair (N agents = N×(N-1)/2 pairs, but focus on pairs that share time, resources, or data flows): (2) Check for conflicting outputs: do these two agents ever produce contradictory recommendations or behaviors? If yes → resolve with scope separation or priority hierarchy. (3) Check for throughput mismatch: does one agent produce output that the other consumes? If yes, is the producer faster than the consumer? If yes → throttle producer, increase consumer capacity, or add a buffer. (4) Check for resource competition: do these agents claim the same resource (time, attention, energy)? If yes → apply an allocation mechanism (Match allocation mechanism to contention structure…). (5) For systems with many agents, prioritize pairs that share resources or data flows — these have the highest interaction-failure probability.