Skip to main content

ADR-010: Debate Orchestration Pattern

Status​

Accepted

Context​

Aragora needed a flexible system for orchestrating multi-agent debates where heterogeneous AI agents discuss, critique, and improve responses. The core challenge was designing a pattern that:

  • Supports multiple debate protocols (adversarial, collaborative, Socratic)
  • Handles agent failures gracefully
  • Enables extensibility for new phase types
  • Maintains consensus detection and convergence tracking

Decision​

We adopted the Arena-Phase pattern with the following structure:

Arena (Orchestrator)​

  • aragora/debate/orchestrator.py - Main Arena class
  • Coordinates phases, manages state, handles consensus detection
  • Uses ELO-based team selection (team_selector.py)
  • Integrates memory systems via memory_manager.py

Phase Protocol​

  • Each debate phase implements a common interface
  • Phases are extracted to aragora/debate/phases/:
    • proposal_phase.py - Initial proposals
    • critique_phase.py - Cross-agent critique
    • voting_phase.py - Agent voting
    • synthesis_phase.py - Consensus synthesis
    • consensus_verification.py - Final verification

Execution Flow​

Arena.run()
  -> PhaseExecutor.execute_phase()
     -> For each agent: agent.generate() / agent.critique() / agent.vote()
  -> ConsensusDetector.check_consensus()
  -> ConvergenceTracker.update()

Agent Fallback​

  • aragora/agents/fallback.py - OpenRouter fallback on quota errors
  • aragora/resilience.py - CircuitBreaker for failure handling
  • aragora/agents/airlock.py - AirlockProxy for agent resilience

Consequences​

Positive:

  • Clean separation between orchestration and agent logic
  • Easy to add new phases without modifying core
  • Robust error handling with fallback mechanisms
  • ELO-based selection improves team quality over time

Negative:

  • Complex state management across phases
  • Debate module grew large (38.5K lines) - potential decomposition needed
  • Phase dependencies require careful ordering

References​

  • aragora/debate/orchestrator.py - Arena implementation
  • aragora/debate/phases/ - Phase implementations
  • docs/DEBATE_PHASES.md - Phase documentation