Message-Bus Patterns for Multi-Agent Coordination

Two engineering teams published conflicting advice on multi-agent systems in June 2025. Anthropic's research system used a supervisor dispatching parallel workers, beating a single agent by 90.2% on breadth-first tasks. Cognition argued against multi-agents for code generation, where context cannot be sliced. The article explains that handoffs cause growing transcripts and lost context, while a shared bus with a supervisor is the default pattern.