OpenAI Codex dev: AI agent swarms waste tokens with zero quality gain
The Decoder · rss · 2026-09-17
OpenAI Codex developer Eric Provencher warns that running more than two parallel sub-agents almost always burns tokens without improving quality, because agents don't trust each other and end up double-checking each other's work — a phenomenon he calls the "coordination tax".
He cites a project where 1,393 agents spent $20,000 in tokens on a single Python refactoring that one Astra agent could have handled at a fraction of the cost.
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