Why We Killed Our Multi-Agent Pipeline — Subbiah Sethuraman and Abhilash Asokan, ZS Associates
Jul 23, 2026 · 15:00
Subbiah Sethuraman and Abhilash Asokan of ZS Associates explain why they killed their multi-agent pipeline for pharma commercial analytics: the system produced incoherent output because no single agent owned end-to-end reasoning, domain knowledge was missing, and LLMs were used for deterministic signal detection. Observing Claude Code in an empty directory, they rebuilt with a deterministic pipeline that detects signals before the agent wakes up, consolidated to a single agent that owns reasoning and spawns sub-agents only for focused lookups, and added a knowledge graph as a control plane where every edge is a hypothesis the agent tests against data. The new system does in 20 minutes what an analyst did in a month, achieving bounded search and coherent output.
