My thoughts on their thoughts:
- (in response to the sequence task decomposition diagram) Its hard to think about this without taking into account the outputs as part of the context.
In this example you may not need the subtask 1 when prompting subtask 2 given that the output of subtast 1 is provided.
- “Depending on the domain, you might even consider fine-tuning a smaller model (this is in fact something we’ve done at Cognition).” (“Cognition | Don’t Build Multi-Agents”) this violates the idea that smaller is dumber and thus best fitted for less impact jobs (in fact the team seems to support this sentiment in the section "edit apply models")
- “So, builders had the large models output markdown explanations of code edits and then fed these markdown explanations to small models to actually rewrite the files. However, these systems would still be very faulty. Often times, for example, the small model would misinterpret the instructions of the large model and make an incorrect edit due to the most slight ambiguities in the instructions. Today, the edit decision-making and applying are more often done by a single model in one action.” (“Cognition | Don’t Build Multi-Agents”) would love to see where other coding agents did this.
- “However, agents today are not quite able to engage in this style of long-context proactive discourse with much more reliability than you would get with a single agent. Humans are quite efficient at communicating our most important knowledge to one another, but this efficiency takes nontrivial intelligence.” (“Cognition | Don’t Build Multi-Agents”) if you operate under the aforementioned principles of context engineering then more than likely that discoruse is not proactive. Since it would be nothing more than chain of thought.
This is based on the speculation that the reason this works for humans is the diversity of knowledge that makes these discussions proactive
- “I don’t see anyone putting a dedicated effort to solving this difficult cross-agent context-passing problem.” (“Cognition | Don’t Build Multi-Agents”) A2A addresses context passing
