Coordination overhead includes task decomposition, duplicated context, communication, waiting, merging and conflicts. It can outweigh the benefits of multiple agents.
Context isolation gives each subagent only the context necessary for its role, protecting the primary thread from noisy logs and exploratory dead ends. Concurrency safety prevents conflicting edits or unsafe simultaneous changes. Prefer parallel read-heavy tasks; assign clear file ownership for parallel writing.
Termination and budget policies set limits on agent count, iterations, time, tokens and tool calls. Orchestrated workflows need explicit stopping conditions.
