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Comment by rbren | Hacker News Reader

The idea of swarming multiple agents on a task isn't new. And honestly we haven't seen it really work in practice. We've tested multi-agent systems a bunch with OpenHands [1] and have never really seen a bump on benchmark scores despite the massive increase in complexity. There's nothing that many different agents can do that a single generalist can't accomplish on its own.

That said, they can potentially get you a speedup if you have a neatly separable task, and can parallelize the work. But it doesn't lead to some quantum leap in what agents are able to accomplish unsupervised.

I do think some form of multi-agent workflow is going to become important over the next few years, but more because it fits our mental model of the world rather than being some big technological unlock.

[1] https://github.com/All-Hands-AI/OpenHands

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Same observations we had talking to many of our users. The trick to build reliable systems, is minimize the complexity to the max, not the other way around.

I think the theoretical value of multi-agents is collaboration with external agents (outside your code base). Other than that, there is a very little use cases where it make sense (e.g. https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/built-multi-agent-rese... ), and building it / debugging them take much much longer and is much harder. So unless you have the ressources, not worth the trouble

This isn't multi-agents at all. Infact if you read the article in detail, you will realize that the author goes in detail to explain how this system is different from multi-agents. And this is exactly why the author calls it "Agency" because it is fundamentally different from multi-agents.

I agree that multi-agent doesnt work in practice. But this isnt that.

How is this different from multiple agents? Are you saying using different models for different parts of the task is a fundamental difference from using one model for different parts of the task?

Using different models for different things isn’t new at all. The article seems like an excuse to get some marketing out there (and it’s poor at that - they got me looking at what was built with their product but I can’t see the actual code. Feels scammy.)

1. Multi-Agent is divide a part into tasks and hand off each part to a different Agent. This is different in the sense that a task is not divided into parts aprior. When the agent gets to a roadblock - lets say it is unable to fix a software issue - it rolls up to a deep think model to unblock. But you might be right that the difference is too subtle too notice.

2. "they got me looking at what was built with their product but I can’t see the actual code. Feels scammy" - What do you mean by you can't see the actual code ? You can just signup and use NonBioS to build software. And you can see the code written by NonBioS in multiple ways - ask it give you a downloadable zip, ask it to checkin the code to github, ask it to show you the code on the screen. Infact that the black boxes which scroll up, you can just expand them and see the code it is writing directly.

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