OpenAI released Swarm as an "educational framework" for multi-agent orchestration. The developer community immediately started building production systems with it.
This is both predictable and concerning. Here's why.
What Swarm Gets Right
Swarm's core insight is that most multi-agent systems are over-engineered. You don't need a complex orchestration layer if your agents can simply hand off to each other.
The API is dead simple:
from swarm import Swarm, Agent
client = Swarm()
triage_agent = Agent(
name="Triage",
instructions="Route the user to the right specialist.",
functions=[transfer_to_code_agent, transfer_to_docs_agent]
)
code_agent = Agent(
name="Code Analyst",
instructions="Analyze code and answer questions.",
functions=[search_codebase, get_file_content]
)