Code Agent Anatomy (19): AgentTeams — The Life and Death of an Experimental System

Description and use

Removing the experimental AgentTeams feature from MyCodeAgent reduced code size by 27 %, eliminated a second loop, and clarified the project scope while preserving the design for future study.

Problem

AgentTeams, an experimental multi‑agent feature, was removed from the MyCodeAgent codebase because it introduced excessive complexity, exceeded the scope of the core harness, and imposed maintenance costs.

Outcome

Removal of AgentTeams reduced code size by 27%, eliminated a second loop, and clarified the project’s scope while preserving the design for future study.

Workflow

• 1. Identify that AgentTeams exceeded scope and added complexity.
• 2. Document removal in a dedicated commit and reference it in docs/research-archive.md.
• 3. Remove AgentTeams code from the main branch while keeping the commit history.
• 4. Replace multi‑agent functionality with constrained sub‑agents configured to run on the single RuntimeRunner loop.
• 5. Update tests to cover the new sub‑agent configurations and remove AgentTeams‑specific tests.

Evidence

The FINAL_REPORT has a data point that illustrates the severity of this problem: before streamlining the runtime, stable production code was 19,320 lines; after removing AgentTeams and other experimental features, it dropped to 14,094 lines. A reduction of 27%.

Source

AgentTeams was removed, but not "deleted." The code was moved out through a documented commit, and then the exact commit reference was saved in docs/research-archive.md.

Source