Agents
Agent Orchestration
Agent orchestration is the coordination of multiple AI agents — assigning tasks, managing information flow between them, handling failures, and aggregating results into a final output. Common orchestration patterns include planner-executor, supervisor-worker, and event-driven pipelines.
Orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI, and Anthropic's multi-agent primitives provide the infrastructure for routing messages, enforcing context limits, and retrying failed sub-tasks. The orchestration layer is where most production bugs in multi-agent systems appear.
Related terms
- Multi-Agent System — A multi-agent system is a coordinated set of specialized AI agents that each handle one part of a workflow and communicate through structured messages.
- Autonomous Agent — An autonomous agent is an AI system that pursues a goal end-to-end without human approval at each step, using tools to act on the world and adapting its plan as it receives feedback.
- AI Agent — An AI agent is a software system that takes a goal, plans a sequence of steps to reach it, executes those steps using tools (APIs, databases, browsers, code), and adapts when steps fail.