OpenAI lands in roughly the identical place. Its sensible information recommends maximizing a single agent’s capabilities first as a result of one agent plus instruments retains complexity, analysis, and upkeep extra manageable. It explicitly suggests immediate templates as a option to soak up branching complexity with out leaping to a multi-agent framework. Microsoft is equally blunt: If the use case doesn’t clearly cross safety or compliance boundaries, contain a number of groups, or in any other case require architectural separation, begin with a single-agent prototype. It even cautions that “planner,” “reviewer,” and “executor” roles don’t mechanically justify a number of brokers, as a result of one agent can typically emulate these roles via persona switching, conditional prompting, and gear permissioning. Google, for its half, provides a very helpful nuance right here, warning that the mistaken alternative between a sub-agent and an agent packaged as a software can create huge overhead. In different phrases, generally you don’t want one other teammate. You want a perform with a clear contract.
Microsoft makes yet one more level that deserves further consideration: Many obvious scale issues stem from retrieval design, not structure. So, earlier than you add extra brokers, repair chunking, indexing, reranking, immediate construction, and context choice. That isn’t much less bold. It is extra grownup. We discovered this the onerous means with microservices. Complexity doesn’t vanish whenever you decompose a system. It relocates. Back then, it moved into the community. Now it threatens to maneuver into hand-offs, prompts, arbitration, and agent state.
Distributed intelligence continues to be distributed
What may have been one robust mannequin name, retrieval, and some rigorously designed instruments can rapidly flip into agent routing, context hand-offs, arbitration, permissioning, and observability throughout a swarm of probabilistic elements. That could also be price it when the issue is really distributed, however typically it’s not. Distributed intelligence continues to be distributed methods, and distributed methods aren’t low-cost to construct or preserve.
