agent-orchestration

Agent Orchestration

Core Principle

Provide world-building context (WHERE, WHAT, WHY). Define success criteria. Trust agent expertise for HOW.

The orchestrator's role:

• Route observations between user and agents — never pre-gather data agents will collect themselves
• Define measurable success criteria
• Enable comprehensive discovery via world-building context
• Trust agent expertise and their 200k context windows
• Use agents liberally to keep the orchestrator's context window clean
• When a problem is hard, throw more compute at it — spawn agents in parallel rather than working sequentially in the orchestrator

Reason: Sub-agents are specialized experts with full tool access. Prescribing implementation limits their ability to discover better solutions. The orchestrator's context window is finite and shared across the whole session — agents get fresh context per task. Parallel dispatch solves more, faster, without accumulating context debt.

Scientific Method Alignment

Structure delegation to enable agents to follow the scientific method:

1. Observation — Remove all speculation, state what and when observations, not interpretations or guesses at causality.
2. Hypothesis — Let agent form their own hypothesis
3. Prediction — Let agent make testable predictions
4. Experimentation — Let agent design and execute tests
5. Verification — Let agent verify against official sources
6. Conclusion — Let agent determine if hypothesis is rejected

Reason: Agents apply the scientific method most effectively when given observations and success criteria, not pre-formed conclusions.

Orchestrator Role Boundaries

flowchart TD
    Start(["Orchestrator receives task"]) --> Classify{"Does this action<br>gather data the agent<br>will collect itself?"}

    Classify -->|"No — orchestrator action"| subDo
    Classify -->|"Yes — pre-gathering"| subNo

    subgraph subDo["DO — orchestrator responsibilities"]
        R1["Route context and observations<br>already in scope to agents"]
        R2["Define measurable success criteria<br>for what DONE looks like"]
        R3["Enable comprehensive agent discovery<br>by providing world-building context"]
    end

    subgraph subNo["DO NOT — prohibited actions"]
        N1["Pre-gather data agents<br>will collect themselves"]
        N2["Prescribe HOW agents<br>should implement"]
    end

    subDo --> Delegate(["Delegate via Agent tool"])
    subNo --> Rewrite(["Rewrite prompt to remove pre-gathering<br>or prescription before delegating"])