How multi-agent orchestration (the symphony) replaced single-agent IDE work (the solo) — and what changed
The canonical home of the Solo era / Symphony era framing. - Solo era: one coding agent inside an IDE, bounded by its context window. - Symphony era: orchestration platforms deploying many specialised worker agents at once. Argues that both are incompatible with traditional development rhythms, documentation standards and decision structures. Thorough specification in Phase 1 is non-negotiable; rushing it produces failures at the 70–80% completion mark. Code-quality problems are specification problems. Case study: an AI avatar platform built in one month end to end (one week of research, three weeks of build). Records 8–15 s latency with most models versus near-zero with Qwen 3.