Cohere study: well-organized agent teams beat solo coding agents at a fraction of the cost
Cohere built a controlled testbed to study how teams of coding agents should be organized, testing where work is delegated, how leads wait on workers, which models play which role, team size, and communication patterns. On ProgramBench, well-organized teams outperformed single agents by up to ~10 percentage points but at 3–7x higher cost. The key finding: delegating only exploration and planning to workers matched the performance of delegating all stages (implementation and verification too) at half the cost, and a strong lead paired with 16 cheap planning workers reached 61.8% reward versus 63.2% for an all-strong-model team, cutting cost from $510 to $155.