Conclusion first: multi-agent collaboration is not “spinning up a few more model instances.” It has to solve task scheduling, context isolation, permission control, state management, and result merging — every one of which is an engineering problem, not a prompt problem.

The multi-agent stories on TikTok and Xiaohongshu usually go like this: one agent researches, one agent writes code, one agent runs tests, one agent does review, and the main agent collects results like a project manager. The comments: “Whoa, that’s insane.”