My AI Agents Talk to Each Other. Here's the Inter-Agent Communication Protocol

Most multi-agent demos skip the boring part. They show a planner, a coder, maybe a reviewer, and a nice loop between them. What they usually do not show is this: how does one agent know when it must ask another one for help? That turned out to be the hard part in my system. I run a solo company with AI agent departments. There is a CEO, CFO, COO, Marketing, Accountant, Lawyer, CTO, and an Improver that upgrades the rest. They handle strategy, pricing, tax checks, content, technical reviews, and daily operations across five products. Giving them roles was easy. Making the handoffs reliable was not. Without a protocol, you get one of two bad outcomes. Agents stay in their lane too hard and miss obvious cross-domain risks Agents ask everyone about everything and the system turns into a committee Neither scales. So I ended up writing a simple inter-agent communication protocol. Not a vague "collaborate when useful" instruction. An actual protocol with triggers, message format, loop prevent