It shouldn't be prohibitively expensive because the more you break the work into smaller parts, theoretically the smaller a model can be that completes it.
Therefore your agent swarms don't have to be cutting edge API calls, they can be hosted on clusters of tiny cheap computers with small CPU GPU. For orgs you could basically invest in a local server that has 100s of small computers.
You can use engineers and frontier models to plan and do task subdivision. And then shit that out to the local cluster that's basically handling each small task without knowing what it's supposed to do.
The real issue is the middle. Testing, verifying interconnectivity of mid level abstractions, building that amount of tech debt at such a high rate and actually being aware in any way what it is that you've built.
I think for most MBAs, considering the US and a significant amount of global markets only care about short term market upside, and AI is still in the middle of the hype cycle, that's not a serious issue for anyone who is profit oriented.
It's only a real issue for the losers like you and me who care about sustainability and infrastructure that survives longer than one market hurricane season.
The twin trends of AI slop being churned out at tremendous rate and deployed in everything, plus frontier AIs becoming really good at exploiting many small security holes to pwn boxen, is going to collide in an amazing cyberstorm that was predicted by every cyberpunk novel from the 80s X-D and we are gonna have front row seats 8-D
This so much!
For my current setup, the most efficient way is to use larger models for coordination, but a heretic'ed qwen 30B model for the implementations. If you build your agentic environment around specifications and test coverage tied to symbols, you can do a lot of parallelization of agent work.
If you then separate the filesystem and tool read/write access by agent roles and policies (e.g. coder not allowed to modify unit tests, tester not allowed to modify code files) then you can force them to use a centralized per symbol/per contract specification tool.
And then you can just let agents discuss issues, where the messaging threads are also tied to the same symbols.
[1] Exocomp, highly experimental: https://github.com/cookiengineer/exocomp