Episode Details

Daniel's clever Claude-powered inventory system worked—until parallel sub-agents flooded the orchestrator's context window and it all ground to a halt. In this episode, we dig into the orchestrator pattern, why it breaks down under load, and the two numbers that determine failure: linear context growth and non-linear attention collapse. We walk through a practical heuristic for estimating your own risk, the update granularity knob you can turn, and when independent parallel instances might actually be the smarter choice. If you're building multi-agent systems, this is the episode for you.