The Orchestrator in Agentic Systems

A multi-agent system without an orchestrator is just a collection of agents. Each one is capable, but none of them coordinated. They might all be excellent at their individual jobs - searching the web, writing code, calling APIs - but without something deciding what gets done, in what order, by whom, and what to do when a result comes back wrong, the system does not behave like a system. It behaves like a group project with no project manager. The orchestrator is the project manager. Its job is not to do the work. Its job is to make sure the work gets done - and that is a harder, more subtle problem than it sounds. What an orchestrator is responsible for An orchestrator does four things, and only these four things: 1. Decompose the goal. Turn a high-level objective into a concrete set of subtasks. This is a planning problem, not an execution problem. The orchestrator decides what needs to happen, not how to do it. 2. Route tasks to the right workers. Match each subtask to an agent capable of doing it. This requires knowing what tools and capabilities each worker has - not in detail, but well enough to delegate correctly. 3. Manage state across the workflow. As workers return results, the orchestrator decides what those results mean for the remaining plan. Sometimes a result changes the plan entirely. Sometimes it confirms the next step. The orchestrator holds the full picture. 4. Synthesise the final output. Worker outputs are partial. The orchestrator assembles them into a coherent response and decides when the goal has been met. Notice what is absent: the orchestrator does not call APIs, does not run code, does not search the web. It reasons about work and routes it. The moment an orchestrator starts executing, it loses the focus that makes it good at coordination. Building one from scratch Here is a minimal orchestrator in Python. It plans upfront, delegates to type workers, and synthesizes results: import json def orchestrator ( goal : str , workers : dict ) ->