skill-agent-topology

# Agent Topology Audit Most advice about multi-agent systems is about how to add agents. This is about whether to. It audits a setup you already have, counts what each boundary between agents costs, and compares that against what the boundary buys. Removing an agent is a valid, and often the correct, result. The framing comes from Liu, Canhui (2026), *The Organizational Behavior of Agentic AI* ([arXiv:2606.30986](https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30986)), which models coordination overhead as **contextual transaction cost** — the cost of making task context usable across an agent boundary. ## When To Use - Before adding another agent, seat, or phase to a workflow that already works. - When a workflow is slow and it is not obvious which part is earning its time. - When agents keep agreeing. Agreement that costs three dispatches and produces what one would have produced is overhead wearing the costume of consensus. - When a handoff keeps losing something and the fix keeps being "add more context to the prompt". - After a workflow produced a bad result and you want to know whether the topology or the models were at fault. ## When Not To Use - To pick a workflow for a new task. That is `/octo:auto`, which already routes by intent, or `skill-decision-support` for a general option comparison. - To decide whether to delegate a task to agents at all. That is the allocation step in `skill-intent-contract`. - To choose between providers or models. See `skills/blocks/frontier-m...