Quick one for the community today.
I've been writing up everything I've learned about the multi-agent trap โ specifically the coordination tax that most agency owners don't see coming until their API bill shows up.
The short version:
๐ด Anthropic's own number: multi-agent systems use 15ร more tokens than standard chats
๐ด Controlled experiments: 3.7ร cost increase for only a 28% accuracy improvement
๐ด Gartner: 40%+ of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by 2027
Three weeks ago, I almost made this exact mistake building the RFA Content Engine. Caught it, killed the multi-agent design, collapsed it to one agent in one chat. Output quality went up. Costs went down.
I wrote the full decision framework + a copy-paste CLAUDE.md template + the worked example of my RFA pipeline decision into a 15-page playbook. ๐ Playbook linked to this post (community members get it directly โ no comment gate, no email capture). ๐ฉ Full breakdown is in today's RFA newsletter:
๐ค Curious โ anyone else here started building multi-agent before realising single-agent would've done the job? What tipped you off?