Don't Build Multi-Agents

Context engineering is now crucial for building reliable AI agents. Unlike multi-agent approaches, effective agents should share complete context between components and recognize that actions carry implicit decisions that can conflict. Breaking tasks into parallel subtasks often leads to misalignment. A single-threaded linear agent architecture provides better reliability, though context management is challenging for longer tasks. For complex systems, implementing a dedicated model to compress action history can help maintain context continuity without overwhelming the context window, as demonstrated by Cognition's Devin.