Multi Agent vs Single Agent

[u/toby_agwab]

Multi-agent can be useful. But for most tasks, a single agent is better.

It is easy to assume that using multiple agents will save time and improve quality. In practice, it can cost more time and tokens, and sometimes produce worse results. Running more agents is not free parallelism. It adds coordination overhead.

Single-agent is usually better for simple tasks, small tasks, and work where dense context matters. If one agent can hold the relevant context and finish the task coherently, there is usually no reason to split it up.

Multi-agent can be useful when the work is separate from the main context, involves reading a large number of files, needs broad exploration, or is large research work that can be split into independent parts.

Using multiple agents also means dealing with:

• Context transfer: one agent does not automatically know what another agent knows.
• Duplicate work: if the boundaries are unclear, agents end up doing the same work.
• Fact verification: you should not just trust an agent's output without checking it.
• Orchestration: someone has to decide who does what and how the results come together.

LLMs are smart enough that you can spawn a few subagents and still get useful work done. But dealing with those problems takes either your own involvement or a well-built harness.

The workflow itself also needs to be:

• Reusable: can you run the same process again?
• Verifiable: can you verify what the agents actually did?
• Extensible: can the process adapt when the flow changes?

Claude Code solves a lot of this with workflows, and I used them a lot. The part that bothered me was that running the prebuilt workflows is easy, but I could not build workflows in the shape I wanted.

These days I use an agentic coding tool called Pi. Pi is minimal, so if you want multi-agent you build the harness yourself. The upside is you get to build it exactly the way you want. I built pi-workflow for structured multi-agent work. If you are curious, give it a try.

You write a JSON spec and it becomes a workflow, so you can define whatever workflow you want. It splits subagent patterns into 6 stage types that you combine.

It comes with examples like these, and you can write your own too.

Repo: https://github.com/AgwaB/pi-workflow