Scaling AI Agents: When More Models Hurt Performance & The Formula to Predict It

Scaling AI Agents: When Adding More Models Hurts Performance “ Core question: Does adding more AI agents always improve results? Short answer: Only when the task is parallelizable, tool-light, and single-agent accuracy is below ~45%. Otherwise, coordination overhead eats all gains. What This Article Answers How can you predict whether multi-agent coordination will help or hurt before you deploy? What do 180 controlled configurations across finance, web browsing, planning, and office workflows reveal? Which practical checklist can you copy-paste into your next design doc? 1 The Setup: 180 Experiments, One Variable—Coordination Structure Summary: Researchers locked prompts, tools, and token budgets, …