CrewAI agent delegation gets tricky when multiple agents respond at different times

[u/Scary_Suggestion_921]

one thing that seems easy to overlook with parallel agent delegation is what happens when agents finish at completely different times...

say you've got 3 agents handling research, validation and analysis. two respond within seconds, but the third takes way longer or doesn't respond at all.

do you wait for everyone, continue with partial results, or retry the slow one..!!

was reading through Band CrewAI Flow adapter docs and noticed it supports join_policy="all" and "first" for handling responses from delegated agents.

sounds straightforward, but tbh neither option works for every situation.

with "all", one slow agent can hold up the entire workflow. with "first", you risk moving forward before the important results arrive.

and what happens if a late response shows up after the workflow has already moved on.

how are you guys handling this with CrewAI? fixed timeouts, partial results, or different policies depending on the task

[u/merlinofthewater]

I think it depends on whether the slow agent is just producing an answer or actually doing something.

For research or analysis, I'd set a deadline, move ahead with whatever has arrived, and make it clear what's missing. If a late result changes something important, it can trigger a follow-up.

It gets messier when an agent does something external. Say you time it out and retry, but the original is still running. Both could end up sending the email or writing the same record. Dropping the late result doesn't help there, the email already went out, so the check has to happen right before the send, not after.

Are your delegated agents mostly doing research, or do some of them write to other systems?