I feel like most AI workflows can be solved pretty effectively by a single capable LLM or with upto 5 subagents however, many engineering teams are focused on multi-agent architectures at huge scales.
Curious to understand exactly when it becomes worth it / what production use cases there are for large multi-agent swarms: I’m trying to understand exactly where that value lies.
If you are run agent swarms in production: what is the main use case / need and what is your biggest pain point right now (state sync, token costs, cascading failures, latency)?
[As context: I am a founder at Acyclic Labs (YC F26) and we are building infra to scale agents. Looking to map out when the swarms are actually justified and when they are wasteful!]
taurath20 hours ago
I’d love examples of it actually working but right now all it’s seemed to be is hype.
ramstar3000op12 hours ago
any interesting hype you have seen at least lol
taurath6 hours ago
I haven't found anyone who isn't working for OpenAI/Anthropic, or isn't selling a solution. There seems to be very little organic takeup - either out of budgetary reasons, or more likely ineffectiveness relative to ephemeral jobs.
kaihwanga day ago
most of the pain at scale isn't the agents themselves, it's observability. once you're past a handful you basically need per-agent tracing or you're debugging blind, worth borrowing tooling from how people do this for microservices
Var137721 hours ago
does anyone have any recommendations for stronger multi-agent observability. I've not really seen anything outstanding in this space yet
idempotent_21 hours ago
Depends on your setup but we've had success with building custom harnesses and processing metrics via OpenTelemetry + Prometheus. This is running on a massive K8s cluster spinning up pods per N agents.
If you are using a proprietary harness like CC or Codex then look into automatically ingesting their memory logs and internal datastores to track progress and then instrument the host to send back metrics
syndred2 hours ago
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paul_irolla11 hours ago
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vancekai8 hours ago
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syncdaya day ago
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