Comment by simonw

A few concrete examples of multi-agent collaboration being useful in my project Plandex[1]:

- While it uses Sonnet 3.7 by default for creating the edit snippet when writing code, calls related to applying the snippet and validating the result (and falling back to a whole file write if needed) use o3-mini (soon to be o4-mini) which is 1/3 the cost, much faster, and actually more accurate and reliable than Sonnet for this particular narrow task.

- If Sonnet 3.7's context limit is exceeded in the planning stages, it can switch to a Gemini model for planning, then go back to Sonnet again for the implementation steps (since these only need the files relevant to each step).

- It eagerly summarizes the conversation after each response so that the summary can be used later if the conversation gets too long. This is only practical because much smaller models than the main planning/coding models are sufficient for a good summary. Otherwise it would be way too expensive.

It's definitely more complex, but I think in these cases at least, there's a real payoff for the trouble.

1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex

It has been my experience that having short focused tasks overseen by some controller code that wires things together works more efficiently than multiagent approaches.

The agents “chat” a whole lot back and forth to figure out what code be a direct instruction.

The microservices analogy is spot-on - multi-agent systems introduce coordination overhead that's only justified when domain complexity naturally decomposes into specialized tasks with clear interfaces.

Here are a few practical reasons for multi-agent systems:

1. LLMs handle narrower, simpler instructions better - decomposing into multiple agents improves reliability (related to instruction following accuracy).

2. Similarly, tool-calling accuracy improves when each agent has a smaller set of specific tools assigned to them.

3. Smaller agents mean prompt changes (which aren't very deterministic) can be isolated and tested more easily.

4. Dividing agents by task enables stronger, more precise guardrails for real-world use cases.

Happy to discuss further!

same here, but I would even avoid "strong arguments" because that's what we all have been doing so far

what I want is real use cases, show me real-world production examples from established companies where multi-agent collaboration helped them better than a simple agent + tools and deterministic workflows

The sentence should read;

"It is becoming clear that agentic systems which run a prompt per work node is becoming a curiosity so we should hype it as the correct solution in order to make a buck despite all the efforts that have been spent trying to one-shot complex problems."