glossary//orchestrator-agent
orchestrator agent
An orchestrator agent coordinates a multi-agent pipeline by triaging tasks, spawning specialists, tracking run state, and routing work between stages without performing specialist tasks itself.
The last clause is the whole definition. An orchestrator is not a stronger agent that does the work better, and it is not the pipeline. The pipeline is the structure; the orchestrator is the one role that runs it. Critics and gatekeepers are roles it coordinates, not rivals: it routes work to them and then has to live with what they return.
Calling it an agent is slightly generous. Most of what an orchestrator does is bookkeeping: which task type is this, who gets it, what did the last stage produce, what is still open.
The Conductor
In the Bureau the role is named the Conductor, and the harness is the product is blunt about its scope: the central session writes no specs and no code. It triages the task against a registry (bug fix, feature, execute-plan, operational-build) and spawns specialists into fresh contexts.
Those fresh contexts are the point rather than an implementation detail. A cold reviewer is only cold if it never watched the plan get argued into shape, which means the orchestrator has to be willing to hand a specialist less than it knows.
What it structurally cannot do
Isolation cuts both ways, and this is where the term earns precision. Agent run cost attribution shows the consequence: the orchestrator never sees a subagent's transcript, only the final handoff message. The tokens a subagent burned live in a file the orchestrator has no access to, so it cannot report them, and a system that asks it to is asking for a guess. Any orchestration layer where one process spawns others it cannot see into has the same gap.
The other limit is that an orchestrator wants to ship. Gate the flow, not the judgment treats that as a design input rather than a character flaw. At a checkpoint the question asked of the orchestrator's work is concrete: did it close every blocker the critic raised with a real fix, or quietly wave some through? It also names the failure mode where the orchestrator's path is spec-compliant but violates doctrine, over-engineering, or building machinery a convention already covers. Mechanically, at a checkpoint the orchestrator writes a request file and ends its turn, spending nothing until a watcher spawns the gate and re-invokes it with a verdict.