Agent Orchestration

The discipline of coordinating multiple agents — routing tasks, managing handoffs, sharing context, and resolving conflicts.

Agent orchestration is the layer that decides which agent handles what, when context passes between them, and how disagreements resolve. It’s the multi-agent equivalent of process management in operating systems — and it inherits the same hard problems.

Approaches vary: hierarchical (a manager agent assigns tasks), peer-to-peer (agents negotiate among themselves), pipeline (sequential handoff with defined stages). Hierarchical orchestration is more predictable and easier to debug; peer-to-peer is more flexible but harder to reason about failures. Most B2B production systems use hierarchical or pipeline orchestration. Pure peer-to-peer remains largely a research topic.