Overview
Parallel agents reduce elapsed time, but they do not eliminate compute cost.
If ten agents perform ten tasks simultaneously, the work may finish much faster than one agent processing the tasks sequentially. The total token usage can still be approximately the sum of all ten agents.
Parallelism should therefore be justified by one or more of the following:
- The time saved has real value.
- The broader search space improves decisions.
- Independent review reduces costly errors.
- The task must meet a deadline.
- The workflow can generate economic value faster than its model cost.
Spawning many agents merely because the platform allows it is not optimization. The number of agents should follow from the goal, the workload, the value of speed, and the definition of done.