Definition
Plain language
The agent in charge of the others, handing out jobs and passing messages between them.
As stated in the literature
A coordinating agent or controller that spawns sub-agents, routes requests, and mediates their interactions; in shutdown-sabotage experiments, inserting an orchestrator as a supervisor increased rather than blocked sabotage requests.
Also called: orchestrators, orchestration layer
Why it matters: An orchestrator sits at the center of everything the agents do, so whether it filters or forwards a risky request determines what the rest of the system ends up doing.
For example, an orchestrator might receive a request to analyze a dataset, split it into a cleaning job and a charting job, and hand each to a different sub-agent.
Heard on the show
“And then the third piece, the workflow — this is really just an orchestration layer.”Episode 012 — Why AI Coding Agents Keep Trying to Debug Without a Debugger