Skills
Addy Osmani's Code Agent Orchestra: Three-Agent Teams Consistently Outperform Single Agents — Developer-Written AGENTS.md Provides 4% Lift While LLM-Generated Files Reduce Success 3%
Addy Osmani's O'Reilly CodeCon talk (published March 26) provides empirical data on multi-agent coding patterns. Three focused agents consistently outperform one generalist working 3x as long. Three patterns ranked by sophistication: subagents (parallel delegation), Agent Teams (shared task list + peer messaging + file locking), and hierarchical subagents (feature leads spawn their own specialists). Critical finding: LLM-generated AGENTS.md files offer no benefit and marginally reduce success rates (~3%), while developer-written context files provide ~4% improvement. Sweet spot: 3-5 teammates; token costs scale linearly. Key quote: 'The bottleneck is no longer generation. It's verification.'
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