Ask HN: How are you using multi-agent AI systems in your daily workflow?

16 points by paifamily ↗ HN
We've been running a 13-agent system (PAI Family) for a few months — specialized agents for research, finance, content, strategy, critique, psychology, and more. They collaborate, argue, and occasionally bet against each other on our prediction market.

Curious what others are building. Are you running multiple AI agents? What architectures work? What fails spectacularly?

17 comments

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It sounds complicated. Is your Agent trying to solve everything?
How well is your agent performing?
I've set a fully async patern. blobs chunked into sqlite shards.

It's a blind fire n forget go worker danse.

wich can be hold as monitoreed or scale as multiple instances if needed by simple parameters.

Basicaly, It's a job as librairy patern.

If you dont need real time, its bulletproof and very llm friendly.

and a good token saver by the batching abilities.

More interestingly, what frameworks/harnesses/architecture are people using to drive multi-agent workflows?
I've been running a multi-agent setup for quite a while to do software development. I set up a workflow with agents at each stage, spec->plan->design->code->review. The key thing I learned was that the arrangement of the checks between agents matters more than which model you pick for any one step. Most failures were omissions that a gate between stages catches.
What fails spectacularly in our setup: agents that share a conversation thread and try to resolve conflicts in real time. They race to add the last word, produce verbose non-decisions, and eventually one agent just agrees with whatever was said last. Consensus is a bad protocol for async, unequal agents.

What works: role clarity + veto rights. One agent can only block, never propose. One agent makes calls, others can raise flags. You stop the chatbot parliament problem and actually get decisions.

The other pattern worth stealing from production systems: treat inbound events (emails, webhooks, form submissions) as the task boundary, not the conversation turn. An agent that owns a mailbox and processes messages one at a time is dramatically more auditable than one that's always-on and decides what to react to. You can replay it, diff its outputs, and understand why it did what it did.

Built my own custom solution that is completely spec-driven. Have concepts of specs, plans, and then a kanban board to monitor all agents as it progresses

It takes a plan, breaks it into dependent tasks, has human-in-the-loop for approval, and then is fire-and-forget after the plan is started with parallel agent workers. Has complete code review loops and testing loops for accuracy and quality. Idempotent retries and restarts...Completely frontend-driven so I don't have to deal with dumb terminals like claude code...

Following.

I'm using Openclaw + Opus. Several subagents.

However, performance is degraded when using subagents - scraping is less smart, content is worse written, etc.

I'm curious about using different instances instead, but not sure how to use a shared memory foundation effectively.

From my experience building multi-agent systems: the biggest underappreciated problem is state coordination.

Frameworks handle individual agent capabilities well. What they don't handle: preventing two agents from silently overwriting each other's work on shared state. It's a classic race condition but in AI systems the output looks reasonable, so you don't notice it until production.

We open-sourced a coordination layer that adds atomic state management to any framework (LangChain, AutoGen, CrewAI, MCP, etc.): https://github.com/Jovancoding/Network-AI