This leaves me two questions 1. Will we ever reach (or have we already) where we can more empirically measure the cost of the adding the nth agent. Like the way businesses of different sizes can know when the nth employee add diminishes returns overall, can we measure the front with agents depending on task scope, resources, and other factors.

2. On the other end, can we see point where we can reduce how many agents are needed down the minimal set? For example many chains have reduced staff down to the minimal number of employees (note I do not agree with this) and still the balance sheet is in the black. I think in the hyper optimization and efficiency society we're in I think this will also happen, although the reality of "I can do 100 agents work with 10" might not be in providers and labs best interest economically.

Great point. It's not a distributed systems problem. It's a problem of many independent components trying to coordinate independently is the load bearing issue.

This was my first article where the AI-isms cancelled my reading attempt.

It's a pretty straightforward problem statement, they didn't really need to outsource the writing.