Multi-agent systems on MCP are where most of the interesting architectural questions live: routing, state, retries, coordination, and what happens when any one of N tool calls misbehaves. Most talks on the topic are theoretical. This one is not.

Since early 2026 I've published one new AI agent every day at dailybuild.xyz. Many of them are multi-agent: price-war simulations, research pipelines, a local agent orchestration studio, a recursive research loop, human-in-the-loop travel planners, and a "swarm CFO" with policy-gated spend. Dozens of them plug into MCP servers.

In this session I'll pull out the ten orchestration patterns I now use by default when MCP is in the mix, and the ten I've thrown out. Topics include: why single-agent-with-many-tools usually beats a team of agents until it suddenly doesn't; how to design a router that survives tool-name collisions across multiple MCP servers; state strategies that don't rot; retry and compensation patterns for idempotent vs non-idempotent tools;

Every pattern in the talk is tied to a specific public build with working code, so attendees can go verify, fork, or challenge anything I claim.