Single Agent

A controlled Amazon study compared four agent architectures (eight variants) across 13 enterprise procedures and found multi-agent or skill-based setups consumed 1.4x to 4.7x the tokens of a single agent for mostly marginal gains. The first multi-agent build actually lost to the single agent on task success (58.2% vs 67.4%), while a repaired version won but at the highest token cost. The authors recommend starting with a single agent, measuring success per workflow, and fixing implementation bugs before paying for complexity.