Orchestrator-Worker Pattern

The orchestrator-worker pattern is a multi-agent design where one lead agent (the orchestrator) breaks a task into sub-tasks and delegates each to a specialized worker agent, then collects and synthesizes their results. Instead of a single agent juggling everything in one bloated context, the orchestrator plans and routes while each worker gets a clean, focused prompt and its own tools — a researcher agent, a coding agent, a reviewer agent. This mirrors how a team lead assigns work rather than doing it all personally. For builders, the pattern helps when a task has distinct sub-skills or when a single context window can't hold everything; workers can also run in parallel, cutting latency. The trade-offs are real: more model calls mean higher cost, and the orchestrator must merge sometimes-conflicting worker outputs. Start with a single agent, and only split into orchestrator-worker when one agent visibly struggles to keep separate concerns straight.