Agents Roles And Goals

Operator defines Agent(role='Senior SQL Analyst', goal='write blog posts about cooking', backstory='30 years in marine biology'). The three fields are mutually incoherent and the crew kicks off.

role, goal, and backstory are concatenated into the agent's system prompt and must reinforce each other — the operator should align them before kickoff. Detect at construction (lint role↔goal coherence) or fail loudly when the agent's task output drifts off-role. Do not silently accept the mismatch.

Agent is in a tool-call → tool-error → tool-call loop. max_iter is unset so the default applies.

Set max_iter to a finite operator-chosen value per agent. When the cap is hit, CrewAI terminates the agent's reasoning loop and surfaces a bounded result (or an error). Default value is [REQUIRES-VERIFICATION] — do not assume a specific number; treat unset as 'set it explicitly to bound cost'.

Agent A has allow_delegation=True and is asked a question outside its expertise. Crew has agents B and C with relevant roles.

When allow_delegation=True, CrewAI exposes a Delegate Work / Ask Question tool to the agent so it can route to B or C by role name. Verify the delegated request shows up as a sub-task with the target agent's role bound, and that the parent task's output incorporates the delegate's answer.