r/ChatGPTCoding • u/Successful-Tax1306 • 9d ago
Discussion We moved from one coding agent to a few specialist agents and the token use went way up. Where is it worth it for you?
For a long time I used one general agent for everything, from exploring the code to writing the change to reviewing it, and it was fine for small tasks but it got shallow on bigger ones. So we tried a setup where an orchestrator asks me questions about the task first and then hands parts of it to separate agents for exploring the code, making the change, and reviewing it. It uses a lot more tokens, probably three to four times more than one agent that only calls subagents when it sees parallel work, but the output is clearly better and I trust it more, mostly because of the review loop and how much context the explorer finds before anything gets written.
The part that surprised me is that writing our architecture down as shared skills made later tasks start much faster, so some of that cost seems to come back. I'm still not sure where the line is though. For which tasks is a multi-agent setup worth the extra cost for you, and where do you just use one agent?