Your team wants to split the agent into a planner, a co...

The human-org analogy is the trap. You split a company into a planner, a coder and a QA reviewer because no single human holds the whole stack in their head — that’s a limitation of people, not of models. A frontier model already holds far more context than any one of those roles needs. Splitting it into three agents anyway means paying real orchestration overhead — extra latency, extra cost, extra failure surface — to simulate a limitation the system doesn’t actually have.

Multi-agent architectures earn their complexity in two specific cases:

• Genuine parallelism — independent subtasks that can run concurrently and don’t depend on each other’s output.
• Hard isolation — a compliance or security boundary that requires one agent to never see what another agent sees.

They lose on coupled, sequential tasks, because every agent boundary is a context handoff, and a handoff is lossy — the one detail the next agent actually needed gets summarized away or dropped. Before splitting an agent into roles, I’d ask what the split is actually buying, not whether it mirrors how a human team is organized.