// What Actually Happens Inside An Agent Team //

Agent teams are an unsolved problem. And it's actually quite hard to get agent teams to work correctly.

This work finds that naming one agent the coordinator creates no communication hub and gives no reliable improvement in success.

How so?

Researchers instrumented 1,902 multi-agent coding runs as temporal networks, with agents and files as nodes and messages, writes, and reads as timestamped edges carrying cost.

Direct messaging grows close to quadratically with team size, much of it from an early round of introductions, then saturates in the largest teams as agents switch to broadcast.

Task shape drives topology. Shared-specification work produces dense connected teams while pipeline tasks produce sparse networks organised around local interfaces.

Swapping repeated one-to-one messages for shared files cut output tokens about 42% at eight agents on message-heavy work.

Agents sought out hidden grading material unprompted, and in a sealed rerun across 244 runs with marked placeholder files they still reached for it in four fifths of runs.