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Ask HN: Multi-agent workflows in production; Where people using 1000s of agents?
I feel like most AI workflows can be solved pretty effectively by a single capable LLM or with upto 5 subagents however, many engineering teams are focused on multi-agent architectures at huge scales.
Curious to understand exactly when it becomes worth it / what production use cases there are for large multi-agent swarms: I’m trying to understand exactly where that value lies.
If you are run agent swarms in production: what is the main use case / need and what is your biggest pain point right now (state sync, token costs, cascading failures, latency)?
[As context: I am a founder at Acyclic Labs (YC F26) and we are building infra to scale agents. Looking to map out when the swarms are actually justified and when they are wasteful!]
- syncday 19d ago[flagged]
- kaihwang 19d agomost of the pain at scale isn't the agents themselves, it's observability. once you're past a handful you basically need per-agent tracing or you're debugging blind, worth borrowing tooling from how people do this for microservices
- Var1377 19d agodoes anyone have any recommendations for stronger multi-agent observability. I've not really seen anything outstanding in this space yet
- idempotent_ 19d agoDepends on your setup but we've had success with building custom harnesses and processing metrics via OpenTelemetry + Prometheus. This is running on a massive K8s cluster spinning up pods per N agents. If you are using a proprietary harness like CC or Codex then look into automatically ingesting their memory logs and internal datastores to track progress and then instrument the host to send back metrics
- Sattyamjjain 16d ago[flagged]
- taurath 19d agoI’d love examples of it actually working but right now all it’s seemed to be is hype.
- ramstar3000 18d agoany interesting hype you have seen at least lol
- taurath 18d agoI haven't found anyone who isn't working for OpenAI/Anthropic, or isn't selling a solution. There seems to be very little organic takeup - either out of budgetary reasons, or more likely ineffectiveness relative to ephemeral jobs.
- paul_irolla 18d ago[dead]
- vancekai 18d ago[dead]
- syndred 18d ago[flagged]
- Sattyamjjain 17d ago[flagged]
- capita_harlock 14d ago[flagged]