Default to the supervisor pattern before reaching for swarm or debate orchestration

Beam AI·medium signal

Of the five production multi-agent patterns (fan-out, pipeline, debate, supervisor, swarm), start with supervisor — it has the widest native framework support (Claude Agent SDK, LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, CrewAI hierarchical), the best-understood failure mode (over-delegation, bounded by iteration ceilings), and the most production references. Escalate to debate only when stakes justify its ~2.5× cost.