whoever leaked this has bigger balls than sense
Google Research and MIT ran the same agent jobs 260 different ways for Nature last month: they held the prompts, the tools and the compute budget identical and moved nothing but the wiring between the agents, and the same work swung from 70% worse than a single agent to 80.8% better, averaging out at 0.0%
i ran my own single agent against the task list first and it cleared 6 of 10 alone, already past the line where a crew starts subtracting
this is Graph Engineering, the layer that decides whether a crew is worth 80% more or 70% less, and it installs into the agent you already pay for:
- score your solo agent on the real task first: above roughly 45% success that study predicts zero to negative returns from any crew you put around it
- under that line, put one supervisor over the fan out: crews with no correction step amplified their own errors to 17.2x the single agent rate, supervised aggregation held it to 4.4x
- give every worker one output and let none of them read a peer's draft, so a wrong step reaches the supervisor instead of four other agents
- run the comparison again after every model upgrade, because a better model raises your baseline and a higher baseline is what makes a crew stop paying
- keep the single agent alive as the control, the only number that says the wiring is earning its calls
turns out the shape does not travel: the biggest win came off a finance task under one supervisor and the worst collapse off a planning task with independent agents
my position, and it is the arguable one: a crew is a bet on your own diagram, and the model you pick moves that bet less than one arrow does
bookmark this, the three moves that draw those arrows before you pay for one extra call are in the post below ↓