A team ships an internal assistant that answers one question at a time by calling a single search tool and summarising what it finds. Quality reviews show no correctness problem, but the team proposes adding a supervisor agent that would split each question across three subagents and merge their answers. The assistant has a stated response time budget that the current build already meets with little margin. What should the team do?
- AAdd the supervisor and the three subagents, because parallel subagents finish sooner overall and the merge step raises answer quality on every question the assistant receives.
- BAdd the supervisor but have it run the three subagents one after another, so that the merge step always receives complete results and the ordering of the sources stays stable.
- CKeep one agent but raise the number of search results it may retrieve per question, so the supervisor layer becomes unnecessary and answers cover more of the corpus.
- DKeep the single agent as it stands, and revisit a supervisor only if a measured failure appears that a coordinator with isolated subagent contexts would actually address. Correct
Why A is wrong: Tempting because parallel work usually shortens wall-clock time, but the merge step is serial and the supervisor adds its own planning and synthesis calls, so total response time grows rather than shrinks on a single-question task.
Why B is wrong: Tempting because sequential execution removes merge race conditions, but running three subagents in series is the slowest option available and it breaks the response time budget while solving a problem the team has not measured.
Why C is wrong: Tempting because more retrieved context often helps, but it pushes more tokens through the same tight latency budget and it answers a coverage question that the quality reviews have not raised.
Why D is correct: Correct: a manager layer is justified by dynamic decomposition or context isolation needs, and neither is present here, so adding it would spend latency the budget cannot afford against a problem the reviews show does not exist.