> Throw nine autonomous agents at a single codebase without crystal-clear orchestration, and they will happily rewrite each other's work in a high-speed loop.
Mm, I think this is quite overstated in the era of Opus 5 / Sol.
What we actually see is that agents are much better at coordinating than humans. Numbers from OpenAI show 4x the agents gives 2x the speed.
Of course, for truly single-threaded tasks you can’t gain much by parallelizing, but ask Fable/Astra to chop a big task into small pieces, write the APIs first, then sub-agents take what’s behind the API, and you’ll usually get a much better speedup than if you asked humans to work this way.
In practice most big projects have crux choke points and then fanout migration/buildout phases.
Even on the cruxes, where you need a single decision, agents don’t have ego and so you can get speedups by eg. asking for 10 clean room implementations of the same problem, and have a judge model pick the best; this can let you go much faster, and no human team would put up with that collaboration model.
Yes the latest models are pretty good at orchestration, if you instead open 9 chats and let them loose on your code base on different tasks without telling them about eachother you get a mess. If you tell one agent to spawn subagents as needed to do the implementation you get much better results.
agents are certainly not better at coordinating than the animals that built them and the entire world of systems around them.