---
title: "What is a multi-agent system?"
excerpt: "Several specialized agents coordinating on a task. Sometimes the right split — often an expensive way to reintroduce problems a single agent avoided."
definition: "A multi-agent system uses several LLM agents, each with a focused role or toolset, that coordinate — sequentially or in parallel — to accomplish a task that a single agent would handle less reliably."
date: "2026-07-09"
lastModified: "2026-07-09"
author: "Teo Deleanu"
authorAvatar: "/team/teo.jpg"
tags: ["Agents", "AI Engineering", "Production AI"]
keywords:
  - "what is a multi-agent system"
  - "multi agent system explained"
  - "when to use multiple ai agents"
---

A multi-agent system splits work across several [agents](/glossary/ai-agent), each with a narrower role, tool set, or context — a planner, a researcher, a writer — that hand off to each other. The pitch is specialization: a focused agent with the right tools beats a generalist juggling everything.

## Why it matters in production

Decomposition can genuinely help. A smaller context per agent means less for the model to lose track of, and role separation makes each step easier to evaluate. But every hand-off is a new interface where information gets dropped, and every extra agent multiplies latency and cost. The coordination overhead is real, and it is the thing people underestimate.

## The common mistake

Adding agents to feel sophisticated. Two agents that pass a vague summary between them are often worse than one agent with a clear plan, because the summary lost the detail the next step needed. Multi-agent is a tool for genuine parallelism or genuinely distinct skill sets — not a default architecture.

## How we actually use it

We reach for multiple agents only when the sub-tasks are truly independent or need incompatible tool sets, and we make the hand-off contract explicit rather than hoping a free-text summary carries enough. We wrote up the real structure of one such build in the [anatomy of a multi-agent platform](/blog/anatomy-of-a-multi-agent-platform), and the [context engineering](/glossary/context-engineering) that keeps each agent's window clean is what makes the whole thing hold together.