Agents sounded cool but coordination overhead is real

Agents sound exciting because they promise autonomy, decomposition, and smart orchestration. In practice, they can introduce a lot of moving parts very quickly. More planning steps, more handoffs, and more coordination logic often mean more latency, more complexity, and more failure points.

That does not mean agents are useless. It means they are expensive in design terms. If the task is simple, a clean single-agent or single-call flow often beats a fancy multi-agent setup with less overhead and fewer surprises.

The real question is not whether agents are impressive. It is whether they improve the outcome enough to justify the orchestration burden. In many cases, reducing the number of clever components leads to a better product and a much easier system to maintain.