Designing Multi-Agent Systems That Actually Work

What this chapter covers

When one agent is not enough, teams reach for multi-agent systems — and often reach too fast. This chapter shows when multiple agents genuinely help, the coordination patterns that actually work in production, and the ones that look great in demos and fall apart under load.

Key takeaways

• The three legitimate reasons to use more than one agent
• Coordination patterns: supervisor, pipeline, marketplace, and swarm
• The failure modes multi-agent systems introduce that single agents do not have
• How to keep observability and cost under control across many agents
• A decision guide: when to add an agent and when to add a tool instead