Agent sprawl typically starts as a success: several teams independently adopt AI agents, find them useful, and expand usage. Without central coordination, the organization ends up with agents that do overlapping work, agents running on stale prompts, agents with uncapped budgets accumulating surprising monthly bills, and no single person who knows all the agents that are active.
The symptoms are similar to technical debt: each individual agent decision was reasonable at the time, but the accumulated state is harder to reason about and maintain than a coordinated system would be. Naming conflicts — two teams name their agent 'developer' with different configurations — produce particularly confusing results.
Preventing sprawl requires treating agents as managed resources: inventoried, versioned, reviewed, and decommissioned when no longer needed. This is harder to enforce culturally than it sounds, especially in organizations where individual developers have the autonomy to spin up agents without central approval.