Why CrewAI’s Manager-Worker Architecture Fails — and How to Fix It

The multi-agent orchestration framework CrewAI has a significant flaw in its hierarchical manager-worker process, which fails to coordinate agents as documented. Instead of a manager delegating tasks, the framework executes them sequentially, leading to incorrect reasoning, high latency, and unnecessary tool usage. The issue is demonstrated using a customer support use case with triage, technical, and billing agents, with Langfuse traces providing evidence of the flawed execution. This analysis highlights the common but unresolved problem and proposes a practical fix using custom prompting to make the manager-worker pattern function reliably.