Multi-Agent Systems

When to Use Multi-Agent Architectures

Multi-agent systems introduce overhead. Every additional agent represents another potential point of failure, another set of prompts to maintain, and another source of unexpected behavior.

Multi-agent systems use 3-10x more tokens than single-agent approaches due to:

• Duplicating context across agents
• Coordination messages between agents
• Summarizing results for handoffs

Start with a Single Agent

A well-designed single agent with appropriate tools can accomplish far more than expected. Use single agent when:

• Tasks are sequential and context-dependent
• Tool count is under 15-20
• No clear benefit from parallelization

Three Cases Where Multi-Agent Excels