On social media you will see the posts. My two hundred agents run the entire night, I am not doing anything, I am making millions of dollars. I think those are all nonsense.
When orchestration works, it most likely looks like passing the baton in a relay race. A script runs in the background. It launches the first agent. The first agent finishes its job and writes the result into a markdown file, and the script reads the file, sees the first agent is done, and launches the second. I think that is slightly better than one main agent running many agents at the same time, which is what my student asked about. I have not seen anyone do that really well. If such a person exists, I want to learn from that person.
A director wants a chain of five agents by next month, each one handing its work to the next. Each agent gets its own step right nine times out of ten. How often does the whole chain come out right?
About six times out of ten. Every run needs all five to get it right at once, and nine out of ten, five times over, is about fifty-nine in a hundred, while ten agents in the chain would come out right about thirty-five times in a hundred. The more complexity you add to an agentic framework, the more likely it is to fail. So make the first agent solid, then the second, then the third, and then orchestrate, and give yourself enough time to do it.
If they ask you in an interview whether you do agent orchestration, say this. I would love to have one general and thousands of soldier agents. But I found that agents are very capable, and when they make a mistake, it can be catastrophic. So when I join a company, I first want to understand how the work divides into segments. For every segment I want one solid agent that delivers consistent value, not one day up and one day down. Once I have that, I think about how to orchestrate. Focus on one agent. Make it work really well.