How Many Agents Do You Really Use - Why Fewer Generalists Win
Everyone starts the same way: build a specialist agent for email, another for code, one for research, one for scheduling, one for writing. It seems logical - division of labor. Then reality hits. You spend more time routing tasks between specialists than the specialists spend doing the work.
The Specialist Trap
Specialist agents sound efficient until you have a task that spans two domains. "Research this topic and draft a blog post about it" needs your research agent and your writing agent to cooperate. Now you need an orchestrator. The orchestrator needs context about what both agents can do. Suddenly your simple task requires three agents and a coordination layer.
Real work does not respect category boundaries. Most tasks involve a mix of reading, thinking, writing, and executing across multiple tools. A generalist agent handles the full flow without handoff overhead.
Five Parallel Generalists
The pattern that actually works: run five generalist agents in parallel, each assigned a complete task or feature. No coordination needed between them because each one owns its work end-to-end. Agent 1 builds the API endpoint. Agent 2 writes the frontend component. Agent 3 handles the documentation. No shared state, no message passing.
This is simpler to manage and produces better results. Each agent has full context on its task instead of receiving fragments from an orchestrator that may have lost nuance in translation.
When Specialists Do Make Sense
There are exceptions. Highly specialized tools - like an agent that only runs database migrations or only manages deployments - work well as specialists because their domain is narrow and well-defined. The key distinction is between specialists that do one thing well versus specialists that handle one slice of a larger task.
Fazm supports running multiple agent sessions simultaneously, so you can run generalist agents in parallel without complex orchestration.
This post was inspired by a discussion on r/ClaudeAI by u/il_94.
Fazm is an open source macOS AI agent. Open source on GitHub.