Orchestrator

What is an Orchestrator

An orchestrator is an agent whose job is coordination rather than execution: deciding what work needs doing, dispatching it to other agents, and tracking what is finished, in progress, or stuck. It rarely edits a file or runs a build itself, its output is closer to a project manager's, decisions about sequencing and assignment rather than the underlying deliverable.

This division of labor keeps the orchestrator's own context light, since it never has to hold the full detail of every task it hands out, only the summary each worker reports back. That is what lets one orchestrator reasonably track a whole fleet of worker agents running in parallel, something a single agent trying to do all the work itself could not do without its context filling immediately.

An orchestrator is not automatically better than one agent handling a task directly, coordination has its own overhead, dispatching, waiting, merging results. It earns its place specifically when the work is genuinely parallelizable or spans enough scope that no single agent's context could hold it all at once.