Most multi-agent tutorials teach you how to make agents talk to each other. This workshop teaches you how to make agents refuse to talk when they shouldn't.
We'll build a working 3-agent pipeline from scratch during the session. Each agent has a single job, a structured JSON contract defining its input and output, and a refusal threshold: a confidence score below which the agent stops processing and surfaces uncertainty to the user instead of passing a bad answer downstream.
What you'll build in 75 minutes:

Agent 1 (Parser): ingests a raw document and extracts structured fields. If any field falls below confidence threshold, it flags the gap instead of guessing.
Agent 2 (Analyzer): takes the parsed output and performs comparison logic. Refuses to run if Agent 1 flagged incomplete data.
Agent 3 (Generator): produces a user-facing output (a summary, recommendation, or draft). Carries a confidence surface that tells the end user what the system is sure about and what it isn't.

The architecture pattern is the one I used for AidLens, a financial aid decoder I shipped in May 2026 for first-generation college students where confident wrong answers cost people real money. But the pattern is framework-agnostic: you'll use it for any domain where your agent pipeline serves users who can't verify the output themselves.
Tech stack for the workshop: Python, OpenAI or Anthropic API (bring your own key or use the shared sandbox), no framework dependency (we'll build the orchestrator from scratch so you understand every decision). You'll leave with a running 3-agent repo on your machine.
What makes this different from a LangChain/CrewAI tutorial:

We design the eval FIRST, then build the agents to pass it (not build first, eval later)
Every agent has a refusal mode, not just a happy path
The orchestrator is 50 lines of Python, not a framework. You'll understand what's happening.

Prerequisites: Comfortable reading Python. Familiarity with LLM API calls (any provider). Laptop with Python 3.10+ and an API key (OpenAI or Anthropic).