Multi Agent Patterns

Engineering directors burn 45 minutes every morning reconstructing a picture five tools could have assembled. Replace the loop: five parallel collectors, one orchestrator, a confidence score, a 90-second RED/AMBER/GREEN brief. Triage out of working memory, into code.

One orchestrator decomposes the question. Four subagents work the threads in isolation. Synthesis weighs the evidence. The brief lands in twenty minutes — not because the model is faster, but because the topology stopped wasting wall-clock on serial wait.

Two LangChain agents burned $47K in eleven days. The model worked. The budget math didn't. Multi-agent cost is a heavy-tailed distribution, monitoring is structurally too late, and only synchronous SDK-level enforcement stops the spiral.