Orchestration

Designing and running the system around the agents (AIs that work towards a goal on their own, step after step): who does what, in what order, with what checks, and what happens when something goes wrong.

The orchestrator is you. Not a piece of software, not the AI — the person deciding the shape of the work. Some of those decisions get written down as software afterwards, the way a rota gets written down, but the deciding is yours and it stays yours.

Running a job with six people on it. You're not laying the units yourself. You're deciding who does what, in what order, who checks the work, and what happens when the worktop turns up wrong. Whether those six are people or agents changes remarkably little about that job.

Why it matters: this is the actual skill, and the one knowledge workers can own without becoming engineers. It's management thinking — break the work up, hand it out, check what comes back — pointed at AI workers instead of people. The vocabulary is new. The discipline is one you already have.

Related: Agent · Supervisor / worker pattern · Workflow