Multi-Agent Architecture: Topology, Task Decomposition, and Communication Between Agents | Harvard CS2680 Lecture 5
CS2680 Lecture 5 (2026-09-23) is about designing multi-agent systems. There are four reasons to split work across agents: specialization, isolation, parallelism, and context management. Any architecture can be described by three questions: who coordinates, how the work is split, and how messages move. The lecture lays out eight architectures, then covers six ways to decompose a task, a granularity formula for deciding whether to split, six common decomposition failures, and why communication is really a distributed systems problem: messages get lost or resent, and two agents end up changing the same thing at once. It closes by contrasting A2A with MCP, with "Is multi-agent really necessary?" as the first design principle.