Most multi-agent systems are built on a broker. There's a coordinator that receives tasks, dispatches them to worker agents, and collects results. It's a natural architecture. It mirrors how humans organize teams. It's easy to reason about.

It's also a bottleneck that gets worse as your fleet grows.

This post breaks down when broker architectures work, when they fail, and what a peer-to-peer alternative actually looks like in production.

The Broker Model: Strengths and Limits

A broker-based system has real advantages for small fleets:

Simple mental model : one coordinator, many workers. Easy to debug.

Clear ordering : the broker controls task sequencing. No race conditions.

Auditability : everything flows through a central point. Logs are coherent.

Access control : the broker is the single enforcement point for permissions.

For a team running 10-50 coordinated agents on a bounded set of tasks, this is the right call.…