Agents Lie to Each Other — Unless You Put a Translator in the Middle

Here's a failure mode nobody warns you about. Your crash tracker identifies a regression. Solid analysis, reasonable conclusions, 72% confidence. You forward the findings to the telemetry analyzer: "here's what the crash tracker found, correlate it with latency data." The telemetry analyzer reads the crash tracker's reasoning, inherits its framing, and returns a conclusion that builds on that framing. You forward that to the anomaly detector. By the time you're three agents deep, you have a confident, coherent, actionable finding — built entirely on the crash tracker's original 0.72 confidence estimate, which has been laundered through two more models into something that reads like a fact. Nobody lied. Every agent reasoned correctly from what it was given. And that's exactly the problem — it just looks like lying after three hops. The bug is in the channel. The Telephone Game, But Every Player Has a PhD If you've ever played the telephone game, you know the problem: each retelling intr