Orchestrator-Worker Pattern

ELI5 - The Vibe Check

This is a project manager who breaks a big job into tickets, hands each one to a specialist, and stitches the finished pieces back into one result, except the project manager and every specialist are AI agents. Nobody works on the whole problem alone, and the boring coordination overhead of a human team gets automated right along with the work itself.

Real Talk

The orchestrator-worker pattern is a multi-agent topology where a top-level orchestrator agent decomposes a task, dispatches subtasks to worker subagents running in parallel or in sequence, and aggregates their results into a final output. It's the dominant pattern for parallelizable agentic coding work, such as large-scale refactors across many files or research fan-out across many sources.

Show Me The Code

subtasks = orchestrator.plan(task)
results = await asyncio.gather(*[
    worker_agent.run(subtask) for subtask in subtasks
])
final_report = orchestrator.synthesize(results)

When You'll Hear This

"The orchestrator split the refactor into 12 files and ran the workers in parallel." / "One orchestrator, five workers, done in a tenth of the time."