The Orchestrator Pattern

Your agent can delegate. This changes everything.

Most people run their agent single-threaded — one task at a time. When you need research, an email draft, and file organization, you're watching it plod through sequentially.

How It Works

Your main agent becomes a manager, not a worker. It spawns sub-agents to handle pieces in parallel.

• Main agent — Conversation, task breakdown, coordination
• Sub-agents — Specific jobs, parallel execution, report back when done

"Research these five companies" → five sub-agents working simultaneously. What took 10 minutes now takes 2.

When to Use It

Sub-agents shine when:

• Tasks are independent — Company A doesn't depend on Company B
• Work is parallelizable — Multiple things can happen at once
• Isolation matters — Clean separation between tasks
• Main agent would get overwhelmed — Too much context

Simple, sequential work? Stick with your main agent. Complex, multi-part work? Orchestrate.

The Key: Bounded Tasks

What makes or breaks this pattern is how you define each task.

❌ "Help me with the marketing stuff."

✅ "Research Competitor X. Find pricing, main features, and target audience. Write a 200-word summary."

Each sub-agent needs:

• A clear, specific task
• Defined boundaries (in scope vs out)
• Expected output format
• A finish condition

Real Examples

• Research: Spawn one sub-agent per competitor, same template. Results aggregate automatically.
• Content: "Write three email variants." Three agents, three approaches, three options.
• Code review: One sub-agent per file. Findings come back in parallel.

The Mindset Shift

Instead of "how do I do this?" you ask "how do I break this into parallel pieces?"

Each sub-agent gets a focused context window, clear goals, and no distractions. They do one thing well and report back.

Start small — next time you have a multi-part task, have your agent delegate. You'll never go back to single-threaded thinking.