AI agent swarms are a massive waste of tokens with zero quality gain, says OpenAI Codex developer

OpenAI Codex developer Eric Provencher warns that running more than two parallel sub-agents almost always burns tokens without improving quality because agents don't trust each other and end up double-checking everyone's work. He calls this the "coordination tax" and points to a project where 1,393 agents spent $20,000 in tokens on a single Python refactoring that one Astra agent could have handled for a fraction of the cost.