orchestrate-engineering

Orchestrate Engineering

Start with the delegation decision

1. Read applicable AGENTS.md files and the task’s acceptance criteria.
2. Map dependencies before creating workers.
3. Use one agent when the task is small, tightly coupled, or dominated by shared-file edits.
4. Delegate only when at least two workstreams are genuinely independent, noisy investigation should be isolated, or specialized review materially improves coverage.
5. Explain the chosen topology briefly before starting workers.

Subagents normally consume more total tokens than a comparable single-agent run. Optimize for fewer failed loops, cleaner context, better coverage, or lower elapsed time—not the highest agent count.

Choose a topology

• Use fan-out/fan-in for independent read-only research, review, triage, or log analysis.
• Use a pipeline when exploration, planning, implementation, testing, and review depend on prior outputs.
• Use partitioned implementation only after shared interfaces are stable and each worker owns exclusive files or subsystems.

Read references/context-budget.md when selecting a topology, preparing worker context, defining summaries, or evaluating efficiency.

Prepare every worker

Give each worker:

Objective:
Bounded scope:
Required context:
Allowed actions and permissions:
Required evidence:
Output format:
Stop condition:

Provide the minimum task-local context. Do not copy the entire main-thread history into every worker.

Coordinate

1. Start with the smallest useful number of workers.
2. Keep research, review, and test-analysis workers read-only when possible.
3. Assign exclusive ownership before parallel writes.
4. Keep cross-cutting decisions, requirements, and interface changes in the main thread.
5. Require concise evidence summaries instead of raw logs.
6. Stop or steer workers that expand scope, duplicate another worker, or lose their evidence path.
7. Wait at explicit dependency or integration gates.