multi-agent-patterns

multi-agent-patterns is a skill for Claude Code from muratcankoylan/Agent-Skills-for-Context-Engineering. It costs 42 tokens per session (3,375 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to designing systems that use several language-model agents, with each agent having its own working context. It covers coordination, handoffs, and parallel work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design supervisor or swarm arrangements, split work into parallel tasks, isolate context, and decide whether one agent is enough.
Why use it?
It helps determine when multiple agents are justified and manage the extra coordination they require.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Part of the context-engineering plugin — 17 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to design supervisor or swarm arrangements, split work into parallel tasks, isolate context, and decide whether one agent is enough.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/muratcankoylan/agent-skills-for-context-engineering/multi-agent-patterns
About the project

Agent Skills for Context Engineering is a collection of reusable instructions that teach AI agents how to manage their context, coordinate multi-agent systems, and evaluate behavior. Developers use it when building or debugging production agent systems, and the catalogue entries are skills, agents, instructions, and a plugin from this collection.

muratcankoylan/Agent-Skills-for-Context-Engineering · 17,932 stars · on GitHub

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add muratcankoylan/Agent-Skills-for-Context-Engineering --skill multi-agent-patterns
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/muratcankoylan/Agent-Skills-for-Context-Engineering

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install context-engineering, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 17 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for multi-agent-patterns

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/muratcankoylan/agent-skills-for-context-engineering/multi-agent-patterns.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/muratcankoylan/agent-skills-for-context-engineering/multi-agent-patterns)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/muratcankoylan/agent-skills-for-context-engineering/multi-agent-patterns"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/muratcankoylan/agent-skills-for-context-engineering/multi-agent-patterns.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 42 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,375 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 3 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Memory Poisoning · line 226
    Skill manipulates agent memory, state, or stored context. Memory corruption can alter personality, override safety rules, or cause unpredictable behavior.
    Fix: Protect agent memory and state from modification by untrusted content. Use read-only memory for critical instructions and validate all state changes.
  • medium Output Handling · line 251
    Output from one security context is used in another without boundary enforcement. Cross-context output flow can leak sensitive information or escalate privileges across trust boundaries.
    Fix: Enforce strict context boundaries. Do not pass output from one security domain into another without explicit validation and redaction of sensitive content.
  • medium Excessive Agency · line 228
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00042 $0.03375
Opus 5 $0.00021 $0.01688
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00675
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00337

Measured 8d ago against content hash 786ff9345eb4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

multi-agent-patterns scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/coordination.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

3 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/multi-agent-patterns/SKILL.md · 268 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 268 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Multi-Agent Architecture Patterns

Multi-agent architectures distribute work across multiple language model instances, each with its own context window. When designed well, this distribution enables capabilities beyond single-agent limits. When designed poorly, it introduces coordination overhead that negates benefits. The critical insight is that sub-agents exist primarily to isolate context, not to anthropomorphize role division.

When to Activate

Activate this skill when:

  • Single-agent context limits constrain task complexity
  • Tasks decompose naturally into parallel subtasks
  • Different subtasks require different tool sets or system prompts
  • Building systems that must handle multiple domains simultaneously
  • Scaling agent capabilities beyond single-context limits
  • Designing production agent systems with multiple specialized components

Do not activate this skill for adjacent work owned by other skills:

  • Deciding task-model fit, pipeline shape, or project-level cost before topology is known: project-development.
  • Designing hosted sandboxes, warm pools, remote sessions, or background runtime infrastructure: hosted-agents.
  • Sharing orchestrator state through KV-cache compaction in controlled runtimes: latent-briefing.
  • Designing the tools each agent exposes: tool-design.

Core Concepts

Use multi-agent patterns when a single agent's context window cannot hold all task-relevant information. Context isolation is the primary benefit — each agent operates in a clean context without accumulated noise from other subtasks, preventing the telephone game problem where information degrades through repeated summarization.

Choose among three dominant patterns based on coordination needs, not organizational metaphor:

  • Supervisor/orchestrator — Use for centralized control when tasks have clear decomposition and human oversight matters. A single coordinator delegates to specialists and synthesizes results.
  • Peer-to-peer/swarm — Use for flexible exploration when rigid planning is counterproductive. Any agent can transfer control to any other through explicit handoff mechanisms.
  • Hierarchical — Use for large-scale projects with layered abstraction (strategy, planning, execution). Each layer operates at a different level of detail with its own context structure.

Read the full file on GitHub · 268 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 268 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A 786ff9345eb4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

multi-agent-patterns is a skill published in the GitHub repository muratcankoylan/Agent-Skills-for-Context-Engineering (17,932 stars, last pushed 19d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 3,375 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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