What I Learned Building Multi-Agent Systems From Scratch

A multi-agent orchestration system emerged from a hack days frustration—manually copying code between two Claude Code windows. What started as a simple experiment became a tool that reduced a 22-hour task to 7 minutes and saw significant adoption across Shopify.

Key lessons from the journey:

• The best automation starts with your own pain - Personal frustrations often lead to broadly useful tools
• Specialization beats complexity - Focused agents outperform monolithic prompts
• Users reveal what you actually built - Unexpected adoption from non-technical teams showed use cases never imagined
• Listen more than design - Real usage teaches more than any framework
• Evolution beats perfection - Ship, learn, iterate
• Patterns emerge organically - Tree-based collaboration appeared from how people naturally break down problems

This talk walks through the journey from copy-paste frustration to production tool, sharing the decisions made, surprises encountered, and lessons learned from real-world adoption. You'll see the messy reality of building AI systems and gain a practical perspective on when and how to use multi-agent approaches.