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faangguyindiayesterday at 11:16 PM2 repliesview on HN

There’s both “no multi-agent system” and “multi-agent system,” depending on how you look at it. In reality, you’re always hitting the same /chat/completion API, itself has no awareness of any agents. Any notion of an agent comes purely from the context and instructions you provide.

Separating agents, has a clear advantage. For example, suppose you have a coding agent with a set of rules for safely editing code. Then you also have a code search task, which requires a completely different set of rules. If you try to combine 50 rules for code editing with 50 rules for code searching, the AI can easily get confused.

It’s much more effective to delegate the search task to a search agent and the coding task to a code agent. Think of it this way: when you need to switch how you approach a problem, it helps to switch to a different “agent”, a different mindset with rules tailored for that specific task.

Do i need to think differently about this problem? if yes, you need a different agent!

So yes, conceptually, using separate agents for separate tasks is the better approach.


Replies

datadrivenangeltoday at 12:02 AM

Calling a different prompt template an 'agent' doesn't help communicate meaningful details about an overall system design. Unnecessary verbiage or abstraction in this case.

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eab-today at 12:17 AM

There's both "no multi-program system" and "multi-program system", depending on how you look at it. In reality, you're always executing the same machine code, itself has no awareness of programs.

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