Budget the Coordination Before Adding a Team

A team is useful when separate investigations or implementations can proceed at the same time. A long dependency chain does not become parallel because you assign more agents to it.

Anthropic's cost guide gives an approximately sevenfold token figure for teams whose teammates run in plan mode. That is a scoped vendor figure, not a universal price multiplier or a benchmark of your task.

Before splitting a full-stack change, name who owns each part, what they exchange and who tests the assembled result. Count every session's usage, duplicated reading, failed attempts and integration work.

Try the arrangement on a bounded task and compare it with a single-session baseline. Pay for parallelism when the observed reduction in delivery time is worth the additional cost and review burden.