Goal drift: how a multi-agent crew ends up solving a different problem

Originally published on Loop & Retry — field notes on building LLM agents that survive production. A single agent that drifts keeps working: loop drift is the failure mode where an agent stays busy — narrating progress, burning tokens, taking actions — without getting any closer to done. A multi-agent crew has a stranger version of the same failure, and it's arguably worse, because nothing about it looks stuck. Every agent in the crew is making real, forward, individually defensible progress. The crew keeps shipping outputs.