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Designing a team of agents

Nicolas Fränkel on May 07, 2026

I continue to experiment with AI in the context of software engineering. I'm fortunate that my team supports me in exploring different ways to impr...
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Mykola Kondratiuk

the hard part is usually keeping context coherent between design and implementation agents. without a shared state layer they diverge fast. what's your coordination mechanism look like?

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Nicolas Fränkel

Designers write the PLAN.md, while implementors code it.

To be honest, I didn't get any divergence, but perhaps my scope is more limited than yours?

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Mykola Kondratiuk

PLAN.md as a shared contract is smart — effectively the same idea. my divergence was runtime, not design-time: impl agents querying a state that design had already moved past. scope probably is the difference — once pipelines get interdependent it compounds fast.

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Oljas Shaiken

I’ve tried similar multi-agent setup, but gets expensive quickly. Adding a shared memory layer helped a lot. Leveraging GitNexus (for codebase knowledge graphs) + Serena (semantic IDE-style tools via MCP) cuts tpm

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Nicolas Fränkel

Oh yeah!

It's my professional environment setup, and we get quite a leeway regarding tokens usage.

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Matías Denda

I love using agents... I have experts in the fields I use to develop, and also I created expert agents in a frameworks I created so I can create apps based on that framework very easy...

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Vic Chen

Great breakdown of autonomous agent teams! The planner/challenger/coder/tester structure makes a lot of sense — having a dedicated challenger agent to push back on plans before implementation is something I hadn't considered but seems really valuable for catching issues early.

The autonomy vs. security tradeoff you mention is real. In my own experiments with multi-agent setups, I've found that being explicit about what each agent can and can't touch (rather than blanket permissions) helps a lot. Looking forward to seeing where the experimental Agent Teams feature goes!

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Theo Valmis

The team-of-agents framing exposes a planning problem most blog posts skip: who holds the shared mental model? With humans, the senior on the team carries it in their head and corrects course informally. With agents you need that mental model to be explicit, queryable, and durable across runs, otherwise each agent rediscovers the same constraints in isolation. Coordination overhead climbs fast once you have more than two agents touching shared state.

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Postelix

Great. I liked the idea, thanks for sharing.