When multi-agent is worth it

I think multi-agent setups become relevant on larger problems. It's the same with human teams: put 5 developers on a small task and it's going to take a looong time.

The gain from working in parallel has to outweigh the overhead of coordinating, and that only happens with larger problems. It's also good when you need to try 3 different solutions to find the best one. Split that into 3 teams.

If every team is an orchestrator (the agent in charge) plus sub-agents, then the orchestrators are the ones who need to talk to each other. So I'd only split up work that's larger than a single orchestrator can reasonably handle.

Take building a game. You could have a team for the artwork, a team for the map and a team for the game mechanics. They're only loosely connected, so they don't need to talk TOO much, and they can churn away for hours and coordinate once every few hours.

Maybe they just need a stand-up meeting.