Dots uses a multi-agent tournament instead of a single agent
The author tested Dots sending the same task to 5 cheap agents in parallel, with a separate reviewer picking one to advance, finishing in 90 seconds a task a single agent failed after 11 minutes.
Dots just turned a swarm of agents into something that actually finishes work, and the trick is that most of them are allowed to fail Most multi-agent setups fall apart because every agent is trusted equally, so one bad output quietly poisons the whole run. Dots runs them as a tournament instead, the same task goes to several agents and only the result that survives review moves on: → Fan out: one task goes to 5 agents at once, each a different approach → Review: a separate agent scores all 5 against the spec, not the vibe → Keep one: the winner advances, the other 4 are thrown away on purpose → Repeat: the next step fans out again from the survivor • Why throwing away work wins > A wrong answer never advances, so errors can’t compound downstream > Five cheap attempts beat one expensive agent trying to be perfect > The review agent never built anything, so it has no result to defend • What the swarm actually costs > 5 parallel drafts run on the cheap tier, not the frontier one > Only the review step touches the expensive model > A full fan-out-and-judge round lands near $0.08 And the part that broke my brain: One careful agent took 11 minutes and still missed the spec. Five throwaway agents plus a judge nailed it in 90 seconds. Same task. Wasting four results was faster than trusting one. The metric for a swarm isn’t how many agents you run. It’s how many you’re willing to discard ↓
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