Multi-agent system
Multiple agents cooperating on work too broad for one — a researcher feeding a writer feeding a reviewer, or specialists coordinated by an orchestrator. The hard problems are hand-off quality and shared state.
Why split the work at all
One agent with forty tools and a sprawling brief degrades: the context fills with irrelevant detail and instruction-following decays. Splitting the job into narrow specialists — a researcher, a writer, a reviewer — keeps each context small and each brief sharp. The gain is not parallelism so much as focus.
Hand-off is where these systems fail
The hard part is never getting two agents to run; it is what crosses between them. A vague hand-off produces garbage that the next agent faithfully elaborates. Effective systems make the contract explicit: exactly what the upstream agent must output, in what shape, and what the downstream agent may assume about it.
Someone has to be accountable
Multi-agent output needs an owner — an orchestrator that reviews each result before it enters the final product rather than stapling replies together. Treat sub-agent output as untrusted input: check the claims, run the code, verify the numbers. Delegation without review multiplies errors instead of work.
In AGNT
AGNT runs multi-agent setups with shared memory and per-agent toolkits, coordinated on one canvas.
Multi-agent system — common questions
When is one agent better than several?
Whenever the task fits comfortably in one context and needs one skill set. Multi-agent designs add coordination cost, so they earn their place only when the work is genuinely broad or benefits from an adversarial reviewer.
How do agents share what they know?
Through shared memory and explicit hand-off payloads rather than by talking freely. In AGNT, agents can read a common memory store while each keeps its own toolkit and brief.
Can agents review each other?
Yes — and it is one of the highest-value patterns available. A reviewer agent whose only job is to break the others’ work catches a class of error the original author is blind to.