I'm watching a lot of people build elaborate multi-agent systems.
Typically, these systems are composed of upwards of half a dozen agents plus an orchestrator, using a hand-rolled (vibe-rolled) framework.
And I can't shake the feeling that we're doing microservices all over again.
The original premise of microservices was organizational, not technical. They were a way for teams within large organizations to move independently without constantly coordinating changes. Most companies adopted them long before they had that problem and inherited a tangled knot of distributed systems complexity in return.
Consider: every agent boundary introduces coordination costs, latency, failure modes, observability challenges, and a loss of determinism. Except now you're also paying for every handoff in tokens. In software, every boundary and layer of indirection comes with a cost.
I'm not saying multi-agent systems are never the answer (see my own work). I'm saying they often seem to be the starting point rather than the conclusion.
What's the CAP Theorem of agent architecture?