Graph Engineering Isn’t About More Connections — It’s About Which Ones Get Used

Increasing the number of communication pathways between agents does not necessarily improve the performance of a multi-agent system. A controlled experiment using a deterministic agent policy found that task recovery remained stable as network density increased from 20% to 100%. As the network became denser, the fraction of communication edges actually utilized by the agents fell sharply. This finding reveals a significant gap between configured connectivity and the behavioral connectivity that truly drives the system, suggesting that engineering focus should be on which connections get used rather than just how many are available.