Conflicting Data & Dates

In a multi-agent research system, two subagents can return facts that flatly contradict each other. One source says a company has 8,000 employees; another says 12,000. The naive move is to silently pick one and report it as truth.

That is an anti-pattern. The architect-grade answer is to annotate the conflict and preserve both claims with their provenance, so a human (or a downstream model) can adjudicate. This lesson teaches how conflicting data is surfaced, and how dates often resolve apparent contradictions that look irreconcilable at first glance.

You cannot annotate a conflict you cannot trace. Provenance means keeping a claim → source mapping for every fact: the URL or document name, the exact quote, and crucially the publication date.

Without this mapping, a contradiction is just noise. With it, you can show the user precisely where each number came from and when it was published — the raw material for resolving disagreement.