The Agent Mesh Illusion: Why More Agents Usually Means Worse Results

Every agent framework pitch deck has the same slide. Specialized agents collaborate. One plans, one codes, one reviews. Emergent intelligence from the mesh. Ship faster, think deeper, scale wider. The research says otherwise. The numbers nobody puts on the slide Berkeley researchers analyzed 7 popular multi-agent frameworks across 200+ tasks. Six expert human annotators. Over 15,000 lines of conversation traces per task. The results: ChatDev, a state-of-the-art multi-agent coding framework, had