Start with One Agent, Not a Team - Why Single Agents Beat Multi-Agent Orchestration
Start with One Agent, Not a Team
The multi-agent hype is real. Papers describe systems where a planner agent delegates to researcher agents, writer agents, and reviewer agents. Demos show five agents collaborating to complete a task.
In practice, a single well-scoped agent outperforms multi-agent setups for almost every real use case.
Coordination Is Expensive
Every time one agent hands off to another, you pay a cost. The receiving agent needs context about what happened before. That context transfer is lossy - details get dropped, intent gets misunderstood, and the second agent makes assumptions the first agent would not have.
With a single agent, context is never lost. It knows everything that happened because it was there for all of it.
Errors Compound
In a multi-agent system, a small mistake by agent A gets amplified by agent B. Agent A misreads a requirement, agent B builds on that misreading, and agent C reviews the result without knowing the original intent. By the time you catch the error, three agents have built on a bad foundation.
A single agent makes mistakes too, but you catch them immediately and correct once.
Debugging Is Brutal
When something goes wrong in a multi-agent system, which agent caused the problem? Was it the planner, the executor, or the reviewer? You need logging and tracing infrastructure just to understand what happened. That is infrastructure you are building instead of building your actual product.
When Multi-Agent Makes Sense
Multi-agent works when tasks are truly independent and parallelizable. Running five agents on five separate files at the same time is a legitimate speedup. But that is parallel execution, not orchestration.
The rule is simple: start with one agent that can do everything your workflow needs. Only split into multiple agents when you have proven that a single agent cannot handle the workload - not the complexity, the workload.
Fazm is an open source macOS AI agent. Open source on GitHub.