The outcome
Gain useful specialization without multiplying coordination errors, permissions, latency, token cost, and debugging complexity.
Step by step
A workflow you can repeat.
- 01
Benchmark one agent on a frozen task set and identify specific failures in expertise, context, parallelism, routing, or deterministic control that justify a team or workflow.
- 02
Give each member one role, minimal knowledge and tools, explicit handoff schema, separate budgets and permissions, and choose coordinate, route, broadcast, or workflow control deliberately.
- 03
Keep consequential effects in deterministic approval-gated steps, cap delegation depth and calls, isolate member context, validate handoffs, and prevent members from expanding their own capabilities.
- 04
Test wrong routing, contradictory members, delegation loops, prompt injection propagation, permission escalation, partial failure, stale shared state, cancellation, latency, and total cost.
- 05
Compare quality and trajectory against the single-agent baseline, inspect member traces, remove members without measurable value, canary changes, and retain a simpler fallback.
Working standard
What good use looks like.
- Prove the single agent is insufficient.
- Give each member minimal permissions.
- Measure coordination cost and failures.
Official references