points by Wheen 1 day ago | 0 comments
> When you hear about the work Anthropic researchers are doing, they seem to be using hundreds or thousands of agents to solve problems.
There's a reason they're Anthropic researchers. The value proposition tanks when you actually have to foot the bill for the tokens you use.
Subagent flows can improve overall performance, but it generally also comes with disproportionately high token use. That gets worse with parallel subagents that are often doing the same things at the same time and cannot share a cache.
[–] mywittyname 1 day ago
[–] Wheen 1 day ago
I'm curious to see your source for these numbers. Your flow sounds closer to a 99th percentile one than a 25th. I find it hard to believe that a median developer is using 5-20 agents at a time.
[–] NichoPaolucci 1 day ago
Yeah... N=2-3 here but my team prefers having 1 main agent and maybe a couple more finely tuned ones for review / analysis / security... I generally have 2-3 chats going on different tasks but more than that and I lose the plot.
[–] mistrial9 1 day ago
the way I read this passage - author claims to be not a particularly skilled or fast-paced practitioner, and yet it is true that author is using agents like this. Next, very advanced researchers -- in the heart of the AI Frontier industry -- are using many more agents with much larger actions.
The "median developer" refers to the particularly skilled or fast-paced, not that there are continuous numbers of every practitioner using N-agents
[–] _aavaa_ 10 hours ago
Give it another 6 months (if that) and you can drop the cost an order of magnitude.
So the median developer is probably using 5-20 agents at a time for a task. I'm not sure if that crosses the threshold of being a "fleet of agents".