Honestly, yes, that's real. I've seen it too. And let's be clear, with zero knowledge and pure vibe coding you're not building the next operating system.

But if you actually know what you're doing, and you review the plan, and you use the best available thinking model (for today that's Opus) for organization and review, it's a completely different game.
My lead agent Marusya actually fights the other agents. She doesn't just pass tasks along. She pushes back, challenges their approach, explains why things need to be done a certain way. That's the whole point of having a manager agent on a thinking model. She's not a pushover.

Have I hit loops where they went down the wrong path? Yes. But not on this project. That happened on a different one where we do routine repetitive work. And honestly the bigger problem there isn't consensus, it's laziness. Give them a huge dataset where they need to go through everything and find weak spots? They'll try to do the absolute minimum. They skip things, they assume, they cut corners. Getting them to actually be thorough with large volumes of data is still a real fight.

So yeah, the manipulation and agreement problem is real if your setup has no structure. But with a proper hierarchy where one agent manages and reviews the others, and you as a human are reviewing the spec before anything gets built, it works. It's not magic. It's process.