> When you hear about the work Anthropic researchers are doing, they seem to be using hundreds or thousands of agents to solve problems.

There's a reason they're Anthropic researchers. The value proposition tanks when you actually have to foot the bill for the tokens you use.

Subagent flows can improve overall performance, but it generally also comes with disproportionately high token use. That gets worse with parallel subagents that are often doing the same things at the same time and cannot share a cache.

> And I'm probably on the more amateurish end of AI development. As I learned these techniques from YouTube.

I think that sums up the "fleets of agents" approach fairly well.

They are doing that because they are running into hardware limits with single agents. If one agent made correct decisions and explored spaces efficiently, they would not need hundreds of thousands of agents. It's is the luxury of great wealth that they can produce a large number of possibly defective samples and then select the ones that are not defective.

In fact I do live outside HN.