Provenance and uncertainty

• Source attribution is lost in summarization unless claim-source mappings are preserved explicitly.
• Subagents output structured claim-source mappings (URL or document name, excerpt, date); the synthesis agent preserves and merges them.
• Conflicting statistics from credible sources are annotated with attribution, never arbitrarily chosen or averaged.
• Publication or collection dates are required in structured outputs so time differences are not read as conflicts.
• Reports separate well-established findings from contested ones and keep each source's own characterization and method context.
• The analysis step includes conflicting values with annotations; the coordinator decides how to reconcile before synthesis.
• Different content types are rendered appropriately: financial data as tables, news as prose, technical findings as structured lists.

• Specify the structured output a subagent must return so provenance survives.
• Structure a report that distinguishes established from contested findings.
• Handle two sources that disagree, including the temporal case.
• Decide where reconciliation happens (coordinator, not the analysis or synthesis agent).

• "The synthesis agent can add citations at the end." By then the attribution is gone.
• "Pick the newer source." Sometimes right, but a silent pick hides the uncertainty and the trend.
• "Average the two numbers." That produces a figure no source reported.

Options that make the report look cleaner by dropping, averaging or silently choosing. The best answer keeps both values, both sources, both dates, and lets the reader see the disagreement.

• 1.3Subagent invocation and context passing
• 5.3Error propagation across agents
• 5.1Conversation context management