> When you hear about the work Anthropic researchers are doing, they seem to be using hundreds or thousands of agents to solve problems.
There's a reason they're Anthropic researchers. The value proposition tanks when you actually have to foot the bill for the tokens you use.
Subagent flows can improve overall performance, but it generally also comes with disproportionately high token use. That gets worse with parallel subagents that are often doing the same things at the same time and cannot share a cache.
So the point I was trying to make is that I'm maybe in the 25th percentile of developers and am using multiple agents for a task, and Anthropic researchers are at the 99th percentile and are using thousands of agents per task.
So the median developer is probably using 5-20 agents at a time for a task. I'm not sure if that crosses the threshold of being a "fleet of agents".
There's a reason they're Anthropic researchers. The value proposition tanks when you actually have to foot the bill for the tokens you use.
Subagent flows can improve overall performance, but it generally also comes with disproportionately high token use. That gets worse with parallel subagents that are often doing the same things at the same time and cannot share a cache.