Two worker agents independently review the same pull request and produce mutually contradictory suggestions for the same function: Worker A recommends extracting the function into a utility module, while Worker B recommends inlining it for performance. The coordinator must produce a single review. How should it handle the conflict?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
When two reviewers give opposite advice, you need to hear both sides with attribution and the trade-off, not a coin flip or a fake compromise. The coordinator should present both suggestions, explain the trade-off, and flag it for a human decision.
Full Explanation
Contradictory agent suggestions represent a genuine trade-off decision — extraction vs. inlining are both valid software design choices depending on context (team conventions, performance requirements, codebase size). Neither worker agent is wrong in isolation; they are optimizing for different goals. The coordinator's job in this scenario is not to arbitrate the technical dispute but to present both positions clearly and identify that this is a decision point requiring human judgment. The correct approach achieves this by including both suggestions, explaining the trade-offs (maintainability/reuse vs. performance), and flagging the item for human decision. Exam caveat: coordinators must surface genuine conflicts with attribution and trade-off explanation, then defer to human judgment rather than synthesizing an arbitrary resolution.
The approach that uses the suggestion from whichever worker agent completed first introduces a spurious ordering heuristic. Completion time has no relevance to recommendation quality. This approach silently discards one valid perspective based on a non-technical criterion.
The approach that averages the two suggestions by suggesting a partial extraction of the function is not meaningful for discrete architectural choices. 'Partial extraction' is not a recognized resolution of the extraction-vs-inlining debate — it may produce code that is worse than either original suggestion. Synthesizing a compromise between binary architectural choices typically yields the worst of both worlds.
The approach that discards both suggestions since they cannot both be correct, and omits the function from the review, is the worst response. The function clearly warrants review — that's why both agents commented on it. Omitting it from the review because two agents disagreed leaves the PR reviewer without any guidance on a point of genuine importance, and the conflict itself signals that the decision deserves attention.