A reference guide for multi-agent system design patterns — when to use them, how they work, and how to implement them with Claude Code.
Merges applied (40 → 35 patterns):
- Pipeline absorbs Staged Pipeline (staged = pipeline + quality gates variant)
- Reflection absorbs Retry-with-Reflection (retry = failure-triggered reflection variant)
- Ensemble absorbs Self-Consistency (self-consistency = same-prompt voting variant)
- Dispatcher-Worker-Merger absorbs Mixture of Experts (MoE = sparse-activation routing variant)
- Planner-Executor-Verifier removed — it is Plan-then-Execute + per-step Critic-Validator; noted in both parent sections