The best practice you followed six months ago might be the technical debt you're cleaning up today.

In traditional IT, a best practice can survive a decade. You study it. You argue for it in architecture reviews. You defend it when someone wants to cut corners.

In AI, six months is enough to flip one into an antipattern.

A paper published this week tested multi-agent orchestration frameworks against plain in-context prompting on procedural tasks. The orchestration lost. Same accuracy. More cost. More complexity. More failure modes.

Six months ago, multi-agent was the answer you gave when someone asked how to handle complex workflows. Not because it was always right. Because models could not yet follow a long, careful prompt. That was the constraint. The scaffolding was built around it.

The constraint ...