A 1,902-run study on Claude Code agent teams by Giuseppe Destefanis and Tomaso Aste found that assigning an agent as coordinator provides no measurable improvement in success. Meanwhile, requiring agents to coordinate via shared files rather than direct messaging swings token costs by up to 42% depending on task structure.
The paper challenges human-style org charts in multi-agent AI coding, while taking seriously the counterargument that the study measured a prompt-level label rather than a real manager’s mechanisms, leaving that stronger claim untested rather than refuted.