Beginner · Systems

Agent Squad

Visual diagram · Math · (in preparation) · Worked example · 3 difficulty levels.

TL;DR. A group of agents with different roles — planner, coder, reviewer, tester — modeled on a real-world team.

Technical Definition

A group of agents with different roles — planner, coder, reviewer, tester — modeled on a real-world team.

How it works

A squad divides work the way a human team does: each agent gets a role, its own context, and a narrow responsibility, and a coordinator routes artifacts between them. The payoff over one big agent is focus and checkability — a reviewer agent with fresh context catches errors the coder agent is blind to, because it did not make them. The costs are coordination overhead and handoff loss: every boundary between roles is a place where context gets dropped. Squads work best when roles map to genuinely different context needs, not just different system prompts.

Visual Explanation (flowchart)

Coordinator → Planner agent → Coder agent → Reviewer agent → Tester agent → merged result

Related Concepts

• Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Protocol — A standardized framework, generally released in September 2026, that lets separate AI agents securely communicate, delegate tasks, and collaborate across systems.
• Agent Fleet — Many parallel agents working on tasks at the same time, typically coordinated by a shared queue or orchestrator.
• Agent orchestration — Agent orchestration is the management of multiple AI agents or LLM calls to efficiently handle complex tasks.
• Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) — Systems composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents that cooperate or compete to achieve individual or collective goals.