@hanakoxbt: Agents vs. Graphs, clearly explained! spawning more agents is great, but it has a ceiling nobody says out loud: five ag…

Agents vs. Graphs, clearly explained! spawning more agents is great, but it has a ceiling nobody says out loud: five agents is a count. a graph is a shape. only one of them changes the answer. point five agents at the same pile with the same window and they converge. the first one writes a finding, the rest read it, and all five reports centre on the same thing. you paid five times for one opinion with four echoes. Graph engineering fixes this by moving the decision up a layer: not how many agents, but who is allowed to look at what. you need both. here's how it works: ↳ the count buys you throughput. five things happening instead of one ↳ the shape buys you coverage. five different things happening instead of the same one five times Prompts → Context → Harness → Agents → Graphs the node that does this is the splitter, and it decides more than any other node in the system. cut a repository by folder and four workers audit the same three files. cut it by blast radius and each one sees something the others cannot. the trick is being selective about what each lane is allowed to see. separate contexts are not a nice-to-have, they are the mechanism. if two agents are meant to produce different things, they must not share a window. if they are meant to produce the same thing, you did not need two agents. one thing to know before you scale it. a branch that throws does not reject the batch. it resolves to null, and that is the containment. which means your merge quietly receives a short list. ↳ filter the nulls before the merge, or one dead lane poisons the whole result ↳ never index a merge by position. eight good branches and one failure will shift everything by one, silently skip that and the run looks like it worked. the output is just missing a lane, and nothing errored. and the one that eats whole nights: multi-agent setups can use up to fifteen times the total tokens of a single chat, because every lane reloads its own core. you are trading total tokens for a clean main window. usually the right trade, always a choice. below i have quoted my full guide on graph engineering. it covers the three topologies, the verifier patterns, and where the gate should actually open. save this and read it below ↓