Multi-Agent Swarms: The Advanced Architecture for Complex Tasks

Ask a single LLM to "Research this topic, write a 2,000 word article, generate code examples, and review it for errors," and it will fail. It will hallucinate, lose context, or truncate the output.

Why? Because Context Switching is expensive for LLMs, just like it is for humans. The system prompt gets too crowded with conflicting instructions.

The solution is **Multi-Agent Swarms (MAS)**. Instead of one genius agent, you build a team of specialists. This is the advanced architecture pattern for 2026.

Architecture #1: The Router (Hub & Spoke)

A central 'Manager Agent' receives the user request. It analyzes the intent and routes it to a specialist.

The Sales Agent has a system prompt focused *only* on persuasion. The Tech Agent has a prompt focused *only* on code. They never get confused because they never see instructions outside their domain.

Architecture #2: The Network (Handoffs)

Sometimes agents need to talk to each other. The Sales agent realizes the user has a technical question. It executes a `transfer_to_tech()` tool.

**The Protocol:** When transferring, the sender must pass a 'State Snapshot'. "User is angry. Asked about API rate limits. I have not promised anything yet." The receiving agent loads this snapshot and continues seamlessly.

The Hard Part: Shared State

If Agent A discovers a fact, Agent B needs to know it. You cannot just concatenate their chat histories (too big). You need a **Blackboard Architecture**.

Create a central JSON object called `ProjectState`. All agents can *read* from it, but only the current active agent can *write* to it. This acts as the 'Single Source of Truth' for the swarm.

Field Note: We built a 'Software Dev Swarm'. The 'Product Manager' agent wrote a spec to the Blackboard. The 'Coder' agent read it and wrote code. The 'QA' agent read the code and wrote tests. By splitting roles, we reduced coding errors by 60% compared to a single GPT-4 instance trying to do it all.

Multi-Agent Swarms mimic human organizations. You don't hire one person to be CEO, Engineer, and Salesperson. You hire a team. Do the same with your AI.