"Multi-agent systems: when two agents are worse than one"
Splitting one agent into five feels like progress — it looks like a team, and teams are how humans scale. But agents pay a coordination tax humans don't, and errors compound across every handoff. Here is when splitting genuinely helps, and when it just multiplies your failure modes.
Somewhere on most agent roadmaps there is a slide with boxes and arrows: a researcher agent, a writer agent, a reviewer agent, a coordinator agent. It looks like an org chart, and that is exactly why people like it — teams are how humans scale work, so surely they are how agents scale too. I run a multi-agent system for my own business operations, so I am not here to tell you the pattern is wrong. I am here to tell you it is expensive in ways the slide never shows, and that the first version of almost any system should be one agent, not five.
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