Orchestrator Pattern
definition
The orchestrator pattern uses a central "boss" agent that breaks complex tasks into subtasks, delegates them to specialized worker agents, and then synthesizes the results into a final output. This is the most common multi-agent architecture in production because it provides clear control flow — the orchestrator decides what to do, who does it, and when the task is complete — while avoiding the complexity of fully autonomous agent swarms.
The orchestrator pattern uses a central "boss" agent that breaks complex tasks into subtasks, delegates them to specialized worker agents, and then synthesizes the results into a final output. This is the most common multi-agent architecture in production because it provides clear control flow — the orchestrator decides what to do, who does it, and when the task is complete — while avoiding the complexity of fully autonomous agent swarms. The pattern works especially well when subtasks have clear boundaries and can be executed independently, like having separate agents for research, coding, and testing phases of a development task. The key design challenge is the orchestrator's context management: it must track the state of all subtasks, communicate relevant context to each worker, and handle failures or unexpected results without losing coherence. This concept connects to multi-agent architectures for the broader pattern family, single agent patterns for when orchestration is unnecessary, and planning patterns for how orchestrators decompose tasks.