Building a Multi-Agent System from Scratch: Architecture Patterns

Multi-agent systems require solving a coordination problem alongside reasoning, with most engineering effort going into coordination rather than individual agent performance. The article describes three architecture patterns for distributing work across multiple agents: the Orchestrator-Worker pattern (where a central agent delegates tasks to specialists), the Blackboard pattern (where agents read from and write to shared state), and a third pattern that would follow, each with different tradeoffs in bottlenecks and failure modes when running in production.