Agent Shared Values Patterns

Overview

In multi-agent systems, consistent behavior requires shared rules propagated to every agent. Without explicit propagation, each agent operates on its own assumptions — producing drift, contradictions, and unpredictable outputs as the team scales.

Shared values are the baseline commitments every agent must honor: coding style, security constraints, output formats, immutability rules, error handling policies. Propagating them correctly means each agent enforces them without needing to rediscover them from scratch, without duplicating them into every prompt, and without allowing one agent's override to silently break another's behavior.

Use this guide when: adding a new agent to an existing team, designing context injection for parallel fan-out, debugging behavioral inconsistencies across agents, or building an enforcement layer that validates agent outputs against shared rules.

Quick Reference