multi-agent-patterns

Multi-agent systems address single-agent context limitations through distribution. Three dominant patterns exist: supervisor/orchestrator for centralized control, peer-to-peer/swarm for flexible handoffs, and hierarchical for layered abstraction. The critical design principle is context isolation—sub-agents exist primarily to partition context rather than to simulate organizational roles.

Effective multi-agent systems require explicit coordination protocols, consensus mechanisms that avoid sycophancy, and careful attention to failure modes including bottlenecks, divergence, and error propagation.

The Context Bottleneck

Single agents face inherent ceilings in reasoning capability, context management, and tool coordination. Multi-agent architectures address these limitations by partitioning work across multiple context windows.

The Parallelization Argument

Many tasks contain parallelizable subtasks that a single agent must execute sequentially. Multi-agent architectures assign each subtask to a dedicated agent with a fresh context.

The Specialization Argument

Different tasks benefit from different agent configurations. Multi-agent architectures enable specialization without combinatorial explosion.

L2 Content (loaded when architectural patterns and implementation details needed):

• See: [references/patterns.md](./references/patterns.md)

L3 Content (loaded when memory systems and advanced coordination needed):

• See: [references/memory-systems.md](./references/memory-systems.md)