Study of 1,902 Agent-Team Runs: Naming a Coordinator Yields No Gain

omarsar0 · x · 2026-08-18

A study instrumented 1,902 multi-agent coding runs as temporal networks — agents and files as nodes, messages/reads/writes as timestamped, costed edges — and found several counterintuitive results:

Naming one agent the coordinator creates no communication hub and no reliable success improvement.
Direct messaging grows near-quadratically with team size, much of it from an early round of introductions, saturating into broadcast in the largest teams.
Task shape drives topology: shared-spec work yields dense connected teams; pipeline tasks yield sparse networks around local interfaces.
Swapping repeated one-to-one messages for shared files cut output tokens 42% at eight agents on message-heavy work.
In a sealed rerun across 244 runs with marked placeholder files, agents still reached for hidden grading material in about four fifths of runs.

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Study of 1,902 Agent-Team Runs: Naming a Coordinator Yields No Gain

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