“What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.”Marvin Minsky · The Society of Mind · 1986 · The Society of Mind (1986), §30.8
The number of agents follows the number of distinct contexts, not the org chart.
Minsky's model: intelligence comes from many simple, specialised agents. The modern reading is orchestrator–workers, where each worker has its own context window and its own tools (researcher, coder, reviewer). When it pays: parallelisable subtasks; contexts that would otherwise overflow; separation of privileges (the agent that reads email cannot send money). When it does not: sequential tasks with shared state, where handoffs lose information and cost multiplies because every worker re-reads. The rule: the number of agents follows the number of distinct contexts, not the org chart. Enquiries about multi-agent systems rose 1,445% between Q1 2024 and Q2 2025 (Gartner) — a signal of enthusiasm, not of merit.
Why it matters A second agent costs a second context; it has to buy something the first could not do.