One Tool, One Agent
Design agent systems as a team of narrow single-purpose agents, each owning one tool or one capability, rather than a single super-agent that handles every tool — the agent analogue of microservices over monolith.
Problem
Monolithic agents accumulate complexity in one prompt and one tool catalog. They debug poorly (where did this fail?), evaluate poorly (which capability regressed?), evolve poorly (every change risks every workflow). They often degrade because the LLM's attention is split across too many tool semantics.
Solution
For each major capability the system needs (search, summarization, formatting, delivery), instantiate a dedicated specialist agent. Add a manager / orchestrator agent that decomposes user requests and routes to specialists. Each specialist owns its narrow tool catalog and has its own eval suite. Pair with orchestrator-workers, supervisor, hierarchical-agents, multi-agent-sequential-degradation awareness (don't decompose what's intrinsically sequential).
When to use
- Workflows decomposable into ≥3 specialized capabilities.
- Capabilities have meaningfully different prompts / tools / eval criteria.
- Coordination overhead is acceptable.
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