Choosing the Right Multi-Agent Architecture

Multi-agent architectures become necessary when single agents struggle with context management and distributed development. Four primary architectural patterns are presented to address these challenges: subagents, skills, handoffs, and routers. The subagents pattern involves a central supervisor agent coordinating specialized, stateless subagents. In contrast, the skills pattern allows a single agent to dynamically load specialized prompts and knowledge on-demand, while the handoffs pattern facilitates state-driven transitions between different agents in a sequential workflow. The router pattern classifies input to dispatch queries to multiple agents in parallel and then synthesizes their results.