What makes a multi-agent system different
A single agent is a capable assistant. A multi-agent system is an organisation. When you split responsibilities — researcher, planner, coder, validator, critic — and let each agent specialise, the ceiling for what's achievable rises sharply.
The architectural insight is that agents improve each other. A critic agent reviewing the output of a coder agent catches errors that neither would catch alone. A planner agent decomposing a task before an executor agent attempts it reduces wasted cycles by an order of magnitude.
This is not automation in the traditional sense. Traditional automation executes a fixed sequence. Multi-agent systems reason about which sequence to execute, adapt when it fails, and improve on the next iteration.
