CLAUDE CODE AGENTS: ADVANCED ORCHESTRATION - Chapter 7, Exercise 1
Full Report vs. Distilled Summary Between Chained Agents
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QUESTION:
Explain the trade-off between passing a prior agent's full report versus a
distilled summary to the next agent in a chain.

SOLUTION / EXPLANATION:

Passing the full report verbatim preserves everything the prior agent
actually produced - nothing is lost in translation, since the next agent
receives exactly what the prior one reported, unfiltered. The cost of this
approach is length and noise: a full report often contains exploratory
detail, intermediate reasoning, or minor observations that aren't actually
relevant to the next agent's own task, cluttering its context with
material it doesn't need to act on - the same problem Fundamentals'
Chapter 1 identified with unfiltered exploratory searches flooding a
human's own conversation, here applied to what one agent hands to another.

Passing a distilled summary instead trims that report down to what's
believed to be relevant, giving the next agent a cleaner, more focused
brief to work from. The real risk this introduces is that distilling is
itself a judgment call, made either by a human or by an intermediate step,
about what matters and what doesn't - and that judgment can be wrong.
Something that looked like a minor, droppable detail during distillation
might turn out to be exactly the piece of information the next agent
actually needed, and once dropped, there's no way for the next agent to
recover it, since it never saw the full report to notice the gap.

So the trade-off is genuinely two-sided: full reports guarantee nothing is
lost but risk burying what matters in noise; distilled summaries are
cleaner but risk actively losing something important through an imperfect
judgment about what counted as relevant. Neither option is strictly better
- the right choice depends on how confident you can be that a distillation
step will correctly identify everything the next agent genuinely needs.

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WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER:
It states both real costs precisely (noise vs. risk of losing something
through an imperfect judgment call) rather than treating one option as
simply better, and frames the actual decision as depending on confidence in
the distillation process rather than a fixed universal rule.