until some of the significant flaws of agents are addressed (hallucination, explainability, bias), I'm not really all that interested in extending this model further.

Agentic AI definitely works for software engineering because we have suitable mitigations for its limitations. It is unclear what those mitigations might be in other fields of application.

The idea of swarming multiple agents on a task isn't new. And honestly we haven't seen it really work in practice. We've tested multi-agent systems a bunch with OpenHands [1] and have never really seen a bump on benchmark scores despite the massive increase in complexity. There's nothing that many different agents can do that a single generalist can't accomplish on its own.

That said, they can potentially get you a speedup if you have a neatly separable task, and can parallelize the work. But it doesn't lead to some quantum leap in what agents are able to accomplish unsupervised.

I do think some form of multi-agent workflow is going to become important over the next few years, but more because it fits our mental model of the world rather than being some big technological unlock.

[1] https://github.com/All-Hands-AI/OpenHands

Can we stop it with the AI spam ads on HN already?

Sounds like 3 card monte, sounds like the fast but short thinkers are running out of analogies, they might actually have to think and realize that the common assessment of AI as an automation technology is not correct. It's a muse and a Socratic mentor, a lobotomy when tasked to think for you, and a Rube Goldberg Machine when applied to automation.

1. Why is the author calling this agencies. He is talking about multi-agent systems, a space with research spanning decades (check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-agent_system ). Renaming this to agencies is weird.

2. Creating single agent systems is already quite tricky. The best practices and LLMOps workflows are far from mature. Jumping to multi-agent systems is very early imo. My suggestion to any builder in this space is to start simple, very simple, and then add complexity, instead of building a house of cards.