Your Multi-Agent System Has a Routing Problem

Five agents. Twenty possible connections. Ten agents? Ninety. The math is simple and the consequences are brutal. Most multi-agent systems start with a reasonable architecture. Two or three agents with clear responsibilities. The orchestrator routes work. Everything makes sense. Then you add a fourth agent. A fifth. A specialized summarizer. A governance layer. Suddenly every agent can reach every other agent, and nobody's drawn a map of which paths should actually exist. This is the N-squared coordination problem. And it's the architectural debt that kills multi-agent systems before they ever reach production. The group chat anti-pattern The default in most agent frameworks is full connectivity. Any agent can call any tool, read any state, trigger any other agent. It feels flexible. It's actually fragile. When Agent A can invoke Agent B, C, D, and E directly, you've created implicit dependencies that aren't visible in your architecture diagram (assuming you have one). When something b