(2026-03-11) Cavale You Dont Need47 Agents

Avi Cavale: You Don't Need 47 Agents. I was looking at a competitor’s docs the other day—I won’t say which one—and I counted. They had 15 named agents. Here are a few of them: a code review agent, a testing agent, a documentation agent, a deployment agent, and a “planning” agent. Each had its own configuration, its own persona, and its own set of hardcoded instructions.
And I thought, “Isn’t this just 15 config files wearing trench coats?”

When a product ships 15 specialized agents, what it’s actually telling you is, “Our AI can’t figure out the right approach from context, so we need you to pick the right mode.”

A model that knows your team’s review standards, testing conventions, and deployment process doesn’t need a mode switch. You say, “Review this PR,” and it reviews it the way your team reviews PRs—because it knows how your team reviews PRs. You say, “Write tests,” and it writes tests using your testing patterns—because it’s seen how your team writes tests

Slash Commands Are a Step Backward

We spent 50 years building natural language understanding, and the industry’s answer to “make AI tools easier” is ... a command-line interface?

The whole promise of AI-powered development is “describe what you want in natural language.” Slash commands are the opposite:

That’s not AI-augmented development. That’s a chatbot with macros.

Here’s the thing about specialized agents that nobody talks about: Someone has to maintain them. Think of it as a maintenance tax.

The review agent has instructions about your code review standards. Great. Your standards change:

Who updates the review agent? The same person who was supposed to update the CLAUDE.md. The same person who was supposed to update the wiki.
And now you have N agents times M rules