CCARF Practice Question

Paper 4 · Question 35

D1 Agentic Architecture & Orchestration · Paper 4

The content moderation system uses a hub-and-spoke architecture with a coordinator that routes posts to specialist subagents: a text classifier, an image analyser, and a policy enforcer. The team notices that the image analyser sometimes directly calls the policy enforcer's action tools to remove posts, bypassing the coordinator. What is the architectural violation and how should it be fixed?

• A.Merge the image analyser and policy enforcer into a single subagent to simplify the communication flow
• B.Add a message queue between the image analyser and the policy enforcer so the removal is decoupled and the coordinator can observe it after the fact.
• C.Give the image analyser its own copy of the policy enforcer's action tools so it can remove posts itself without calling another subagent.
• D.The image analyser breaks hub-and-spoke isolation; scope its tools to image analysis and route all results back through the coordinator.

Show answer & explanations

Correct answer: D

A: Merging subagents with distinct responsibilities (analysis vs enforcement) violates separation of concerns. The image analyser and policy enforcer have fundamentally different roles and tool requirements.

B: An async queue between subagents still bypasses the coordinator, and observing a removal after it has happened is not routing it. In hub-and-spoke, all inter-agent communication must flow through the coordinator regardless of synchronicity.

C: Duplicating action tools across subagents creates inconsistent enforcement and makes policy changes harder to propagate. The issue is the communication pattern, not tool availability.

D: In hub-and-spoke orchestration, subagents must be isolated and communicate only through the coordinator. The image analyser should return its classification result to the coordinator, which then decides whether to invoke the policy enforcer. Direct subagent-to-subagent communication breaks the architecture.

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