agentic-tooling-wiki

Agent orchestration (orchestrator-worker fan-out)

The pattern of a main agent decomposing a task and fanning out to parallel subagents, then collecting/verifying their results — the recurring agentic-execution shape across this wiki. Introduced by orchestration-mode.

The pattern

• Three tiers: orchestrator (main loop) → a fan-out tool → many parallel subagents (each a small nested agent loop with its own tools), results collected and often cross-checked.
• Standing consent lets the orchestrator fan out by default for substantive work rather than asking each time; mid-conversation system messages toggle/steer it while preserving the prompt cache (a claude-opus-4-8 capability).
• Quality moves: adversarial verification (a second wave checks the first), a completeness critic, multi-phase sequencing (understand → design → implement → review). The same two-agent implementer/egoless-reviewer pattern doubles as a safety gate (agent-guardrails).

Instances in this wiki

• orchestration-mode — the worked API example (Workflow tool → ≤10 subagents).
• claude-managed-agents — ships agent.yaml + depth-1 leaf-worker subagents and a handoff_request event loop.
• gbrain — runs subagents as a durable, crash-safe Minions job queue.
• agentsys — 49 single-responsibility agents behind phase-gated pipelines and multi-agent /audit-project review.
• agent-kanban — a supervised, collaborative variant: a shared board with agent identity where a leader agent delegates and agents review each other’s PRs, humans watching.

Connections

This is the execution-time counterpart to the authoring-time discipline of spec-driven-development, and the “automate” end of the augment→automate axis in synthesis — work that a human or single agent once did serially is fanned out and checked by many agents at once. When packaged as a product with task selection, gates, CI and delivery wrapped around the model, it becomes an agentic-coding-harness.

Related

orchestration-mode · claude-managed-agents · gbrain · agentsys · agent-kanban · agentic-coding-harness · agent-guardrails · claude-opus-4-8 · spec-driven-development