Single Agent Patterns

A single-agent architecture assigns one agent full responsibility for a task from start to finish, using tools without delegating to other agents or routing through an orchestrator. This pattern keeps coordination overhead at zero and makes debugging straightforward: you have one reasoning chain to inspect, one set of tool calls to trace, and one system prompt to tune. The signal that you have actually hit the ceiling of single-agent capability is not task complexity in the abstract, but a specific failure mode: the agent is succeeding at each individual step yet producing a wrong final result because no single context window can hold all the state and history the task requires simultaneously.