Fred Brooks observed in 1975 that adding people to a late software project makes it later. One reason is arithmetic: n collaborators have n(n−1)/2 possible communication channels.
AI agents do not escape the arithmetic. They exchange context, wait for each other’s outputs, duplicate work and resolve conflicts. Messages are cheap; the tokens, latency and errors they create are not.
Making it visible
The Interactive Lab models coordination as a fraction of each worker’s time that grows with team size, capped at 60%. That is an assumption, not a measurement. Track R02 is designed to measure it — and to find where orchestration changes the curve.
This is a concept note. It reports no experiments and no results.