Ten 95% Reliable Agents Chained Together Give You a 60% System. Microservices Solved This a Decade Ago. (opens in new tab)

The math is unforgiving. Ten agents, each 95% reliable individually, chained sequentially: 0.95^10 = 0.598. Your system succeeds 60% of the time. Add five more agents and you are at 46%. This is not a theoretical concern. A landmark study analyzing over 1,600 execution traces across seven popular multi-agent frameworks found failure rates between 41% and 87%. Carnegie Mellon put leading agent systems at 30-35% task completion on multi-step benchmarks. Gartner predicts 40% of agentic AI projec...