OpenAI lands in roughly the same place. Its practical guide recommends maximizing a single agent’s capabilities first because one agent plus tools keeps complexity, evaluation, and maintenance more manageable. It explicitly suggests prompt templates as a way to absorb branching complexity without jumping to a multi-agent framework. Microsoft is similarly blunt: If the use case does not clearly cross security or compliance boundaries, involve multiple teams, or otherwise require architectural separation, start with a single-agent prototype. It even cautions that “planner,” “reviewer,” and “executor” roles do not automatically justify multiple agents, because one agent can often emulate those roles through persona switching, conditional prompting, and tool permissioning. Google, for its part, adds a particularly useful nuance here, warning that the wrong choice between a sub-agent and an agent packaged as a tool can create massive overhead. In other words, sometimes you don’t need another teammate. You need a function with a clean contract.
Microsoft makes one more point that deserves extra attention: Many apparent scale problems stem from retrieval design, not architecture. So, before you add more agents, fix chunking, indexing, reranking, prompt structure, and context selection. That isn’t less ambitious. It is more adult. We learned this the hard way with microservices. Complexity doesn’t vanish when you decompose a system. It relocates. Back then, it moved into the network. Now it threatens to move into hand-offs, prompts, arbitration, and agent state.
Distributed intelligence is still distributed
What could have been one strong model call, retrieval, and a few carefully designed tools can quickly turn into agent routing, context hand-offs, arbitration, permissioning, and observability across a swarm of probabilistic components. That may be worth it when the problem is truly distributed, but often it’s not. Distributed intelligence is still distributed systems, and distributed systems aren’t cheap to build or maintain.
