Use multiple AI agents only when the workflow earns the complexity
Design multi-agent orchestration with explicit roles, typed handoffs, bounded parallelism, shared evidence, evaluation, and failure ownership.
Multi-agent orchestration is useful when tasks have genuinely different permissions, context, expertise, or parallel work. Give each role a bounded contract, pass typed artifacts instead of conversational summaries, and make one component responsible for completion and failure handling.
Know when one agent is enough
A single agent with well-designed tools is easier to evaluate and operate. Split only when roles need different access, independent context, parallel execution, or separate evaluation criteria. Creating researcher, writer, critic, and manager personas by default often adds cost without adding control.
Make handoffs explicit
Pass structured artifacts with a schema, provenance, and completion state. A downstream agent should know which claims are supported, which fields are missing, and whether the upstream step failed. Free-form summaries erase the evidence needed to debug the system.
- Named role and allowed tools
- Typed input and output contract
- Maximum attempts and timeout
- Failure destination and owner
- Trace link to every source artifact
Control parallel work
Parallelism helps independent research or per-record processing. It hurts when agents contend for the same state or act on partial results. Use idempotency keys, write serialization, and a final reconciliation step where repeated or conflicting actions are possible.
Frequently asked questions
What is multi-agent orchestration?
It is the coordination layer that assigns work to multiple bounded agents, manages handoffs and shared state, and determines completion or failure.
Are more agents more accurate?
Not automatically. Extra agents can introduce lossy handoffs, inconsistent state, cost, and new failure paths. Accuracy must be demonstrated with evaluations.
How should agents share context?
Prefer referenced source artifacts and structured state. Avoid copying an entire unbounded conversation between every role.
