What is the Orchestrator-Worker pattern in multi-agent...

An orchestrator agent breaks a large task into sub-tasks, hands each to a worker agent built for that narrow job, and combines what comes back into the final output. Workers are deliberately dumb in the good sense — stateless, focused, and unaware of the larger task; they take an input and return a result.

The orchestrator carries all the judgment: deciding how to decompose the task, which worker is right for each piece, which pieces can run in parallel versus which have dependencies that force a sequence, and how to combine the results into something coherent. A marketing strategy request might split into market research, competitor analysis, and audience profiling running in parallel, followed by a synthesis step that depends on all three finishing first.

The piece that separates a production-ready version from a demo is error handling on the orchestrator’s side. A worker will eventually fail or return something low-quality, and the orchestrator has to decide whether to retry it, reassign the sub-task to a different worker, or degrade gracefully with a partial result — an orchestrator that just crashes because one of five workers failed isn’t actually solving the coordination problem it exists to solve.