Multi-Agent Orchestration and Delegation
Delegate a bounded question, not your entire uncertainty. Choose single-agent, coordinator, pipeline, parallel, and reviewer patterns. Write delegated tasks with scope, tools, outputs, and completion criteria. Use context isolation to reduce bloat and protect independent judgment. Distinguish deterministic prerequisites from adaptive model decisions. Merge partial results without losing provenance, errors, or unresolved gaps. A research agent has one enormous prompt. It searches six sources, compares claims, calculates confidence, writes a report, reviews citations, and decides whether more research is needed. As the task grows, it forgets early constraints and repeats searches. The team splits it into five agents with broad tools and the instruction "collaborate until the report is excellent." The new system costs more and is harder to debug. Two agents research the same claim. One returns prose where the coordinator expects JSON. The reviewer sees the generator's reasoning and repeats its assumptions. An agent silently fails, but the final synthesis treats the missing result as negative evidence. Multi-agent architecture did not solve decomposition. It made the missing contracts more expensive. Create a subagent only when it provides a concrete benefit: context isolation for a bounded concern. parallel execution of independent work. specialized tools or instructions. independent review without generator context. protection of the coordinator's context budget. If the subtask is one deterministic function, use a tool. If it…
Multi-Agent Orchestration and Delegation: Delegate a bounded question, not your entire uncertainty. Choose single-agent, coordinator, pipeline, parallel, and…
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