Giving five AI agents access to the same repository does not create a team. It creates five fast, confident developers who may open conflicting pull requests, repeat the same mistake, and tell each other that everything looks good.
That sounds harsh, but it matches what developers are starting to see in real systems. Multi-agent demos are easy to make impressive. One agent plans, another codes, a third reviews, and a final agent announces success. The diagram looks clean. The execution is usually messier.
Anthropic tested agent swarms on vulnerability research and collaborative software projects. The results were promising and uncomfortable: agents covered a huge search space, but coordination became fragile once their work depended on one another.[1]
The lesson is not to avoid multi-agent systems. It is to stop treating "more agents" as an architecture.
What counts as a multi-agent system?
