One good loop or many agents? What actually works in practice

Everyone's building swarms of agents. Most of the time one well-built loop beats five agents talking past each other. We're working out where the line actually is. FIRST TIME? This is a small, friendly group that meets twice a month at Schuler Books on 28th Street, in the Chapbook Cafe. Free, no cover, nothing to prepare. Turn up, grab a coffee, and talk shop. WHAT WE'RE DIGGING INTO The cases where splitting work across agents genuinely wins - mostly wide, read-heavy research - and the cases where it fragments context and produces mush. Why coding is the classic place multi-agent setups fall apart. The token cost multiplier nobody mentions. Orchestrator-and-workers versus a single agent with good tools. How these systems fail, which is usually coordination rather than capability. WHO THIS IS FOR Anyone building with agents who's wondered whether to add more of them. People who tried a multi-agent framework and found it worse than a plain loop. Beginners welcome - the useful version of this topic is mostly judgement, not code. HOW THE EVENING GOES 6:30 - coffee, introductions, what everyone's working on 6:50 - what I've tried, including the multi-agent setup I abandoned 7:20 - open floor: bring an architecture and we'll argue about it 8:30 - whoever's still talking keeps talking Bring a laptop or bring nothing. Schuler Books, 2660 28th St SE - big parking lot, easy to find.