Why we're looking at this
Multi-agent demos look impressive, but every additional agent in a pipeline is another place for context to get lost and another point of failure to debug. We wrote about production patterns for this in multi-agent orchestration patterns; this research thread is us pressure-testing that advice against new client work.
What we're seeing
- A single well-scoped agent with a good tool set outperforms a multi-agent pipeline more often than the hype suggests — the cases where splitting genuinely helps are narrower than most teams assume.
- Splitting pays off cleanly along trust boundaries — for example, separating an agent that can only read data from one that can take write actions — more than along topic boundaries.
- In Physiolaxy's architecture, the intake, assessment, and documentation agents are split specifically because each one has a different blast radius if it goes wrong, not because the tasks were unrelated.
Open questions we're still chasing
We're still building a clean cost model for coordination overhead — latency, token spend, and debugging time — versus the isolation benefits, so we can give clients a sharper answer than “it depends” before we scope a multi-agent build.