Multi-Agent on Sequential Workloads
Anti-pattern: split a fundamentally sequential workload across multiple agents, degrading accuracy by 39–70% with no parallelization benefit.
Problem
Each agent loses context the previous one had, must re-establish state from handoff messages, and adds a round-trip of latency and cost. Sequential workflows degrade by 39–70% in accuracy under multi-agent decomposition vs single-agent. Cost rises proportionally to handoff count. The decomposition serves neither parallelism nor specialization.
Solution
Measure single-agent baseline before considering multi-agent. Apply the 45/45 gate: only decompose if both parallelizability and single-agent accuracy clear the threshold. When decomposition is required for non-accuracy reasons (governance, specialization), preserve full context in the handoff message and measure the accuracy delta explicitly. Pair with demo-production-cliff-multiagent awareness.
When to use
- Never as a default. Cite when reviewing multi-agent decomposition proposals.
- Apply the 45/45 gate: ≥45% parallelizable AND ≥45% single-agent baseline.
- Measure the decomposition's accuracy delta explicitly.
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