When should you use a multi-agent system versus a single agent, and what is the supervisor versus swarm pattern?
Use multiple agents when a task decomposes into distinct specialties or parallel subtasks that exceed one agent's context or reliability; avoid it when a single agent suffices, since multi-agent systems add coordination overhead, latency, cost, and error propagation. A supervisor architecture has an orchestrator routing work to specialized sub-agents, while a swarm lets peer agents hand off control to one another without a central coordinator.
How to think about it
Use multiple agents when a task decomposes into distinct specialties or parallel subtasks that exceed one agent’s context or reliability; avoid it when a single agent suffices, since multi-agent systems add coordination overhead, latency, cost, and error propagation. A supervisor architecture has an orchestrator routing work to specialized sub-agents, while a swarm lets peer agents hand off control to one another without a central coordinator.