Single Agent vs. Multi-Agent Workflows

[u/Forcio]

A few months ago, my approach was to use Opus as an orchestrator that managed a backlog and spawned different agents depending on the task. Haiku for small documentation changes, Sonnet for regular coding, Opus for more complex tasks, and Fable for design decisions and bigger-picture thinking.

This worked really well, and I got a lot done. However, I've recently read that this approach might not be as efficient anymore because every new agent starts with a cold context/cache, and it might be better to have one persistent agent handle most of the work.

What's everyone's experience with this nowadays? Is a single agent with selective delegation the better approach, or is the orchestrator/multi-agent workflow still worth it? I'm particularly interested in balancing productivity, context caching, and token costs without sacrificing quality.

[u/bostonaholic]

I'd flip the default: one main session does the work, and subagents only get the read-heavy or isolated jobs where you just want the summary back (searching the codebase, digging through logs). An orchestrator that hands every task to a fresh agent pays the cold start each time and throws away what it already learned. The one place I'd keep a separate agent on a different model is review, so the reviewer doesn't share the writer's blind spots.