https://danorlando.com/blog How-to's, discoveries and other useful nuggets fit for developer consumption. en-us undefined (Dan Orlando) undefined (Dan Orlando) Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://danorlando.com/blog/genai/multi-agent-is-a-trap https://danorlando.com/blog/genai/multi-agent-is-a-trap One team running a six-agent debate system switched to two agents with a strict state machine. Latency dropped from 18 seconds to 3. Cost per query dropped from $8-12 to $0.40. Accuracy changed by less than 1%. This wasn't a fluke. Information theory explains exactly why multi-agent systems can never outperform a single agent with full context. Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT undefined (Dan Orlando) generativeaiagenticaiarchitecturesystemdesignagentsystemsinformationtheory https://danorlando.com/blog/genai/single-agent-vs-multi-agent https://danorlando.com/blog/genai/single-agent-vs-multi-agent Two frontier teams published production data that directly contradicts each other. Cognition says multi-agent architectures cause compounding information loss and single-threaded execution is the fix. Anthropic says multi-agent delegation beat a single agent by 90.2% on their research eval. Both are right—for the model version they tested on. Architectural best practices in agent systems have a six-month half-life. Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT undefined (Dan Orlando) generativeaiagenticaiarchitecturesystemdesignagentsystemsinformationtheory