5.3Orchestration patterns

What this section will cover

• The canvas and the orchestrator are separate choices: the canvas is where you see your agents, and the orchestrator decides what runs next and supervises it
• Without an orchestrator, you are the orchestrator, working by hand in your canvas
• Where an orchestrator comes from: built into your harness, built into your canvas, or your own, brought into the canvas you prefer (FirstMate as an example)
• The problems every orchestrator has to solve:
  • Dispatch: how it starts an agent on a piece of work
  • Status: how it tells you what each agent is doing
  • Attention: which agents are waiting on you, and which are still working
  • Supervision: how it keeps every agent performing well, so none of them loses the plot
• Ways to run agents in parallel between your review checkpoints: parallel worktrees, supervisor/worker, chief of staff
• Running more agents than your machine can hold, in remote workspaces (see The environment)

Kicking off work with a chief of staff

• Easily kick off any new work by telling the chief of staff, and have it captured in the right spot
  • As a ticket, such as in Linear, that you can prioritize later
  • Or as work that starts right away

Factories

• Managing different work at the same time, grouped into what might be called "folders" or "factories" (the name isn't settled yet)
• Each factory is defined as code
• Open question: where should that code live?