Multi-Agent System

A system of multiple specialized agents that collaborate, hand off tasks, and coordinate to solve problems larger than any single agent.

Multi-agent systems decompose problems across role-specialized agents — a researcher agent, a writer agent, a reviewer agent — coordinated by an orchestrator. CrewAI and AutoGen are popular frameworks for this pattern.

The promise is modularity: each agent has a narrow scope, simpler prompts, focused tools. The reality is coordination overhead: handoffs lose context, agents disagree, errors compound across steps. Most production deployments converge on 2-4 agents max; beyond that, debugging becomes intractable. The empirical finding through 2025-2026 is that fewer, more capable agents often beat many specialized ones.