Orchestrator-Workers

Use this pattern when a task is too broad for one prompt, but still structured enough to split into clear sub-jobs. One role plans and delegates; other roles execute focused work and return bounded outputs.

The main value is not “more agents.” It is clearer division of responsibility, simpler prompts, and easier review points.

What to focus on

• Task decomposition: what belongs in the orchestrator vs workers
• Interfaces between steps (inputs/outputs) as contracts
• Where to add evaluation or review gates

When it works well

• The task can be divided into independent parts
• Each worker can return a small, checkable result
• You want parallelism without losing control of the final synthesis

If you want to reproduce it locally

Once your local Cookbook environment is working, you can run the structure check for the matching example with:

make test-notebooks NOTEBOOK=patterns/agents/orchestrator_workers.ipynb