When One Agent Is Not Enough

"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." Fred Brooks wrote that sentence in The Mythical Man-Month, and its reasoning is still useful. A new person must first learn what the others already know, and the number of pairs who may need to talk grows faster than the number of people.

Agents bring the same two costs. A model reads only the text sent to it on each call, and the most it can read at once is its context window, or window for short. A new agent starts with an empty window, so every fact it needs must be written down for it