Orchestrator Agent
The top-level agent that breaks goals into subtasks and delegates them to specialized subagents.
An orchestrator is the conductor of a multi-agent system. It receives a high-level goal, plans how to break it down, delegates to subagents, monitors progress, and assembles the final result.
The orchestrator is often run on a stronger reasoning model (Claude Opus, GPT-5 reasoning), while subagents can run on cheaper, faster models for narrow tasks. This split optimizes both quality and cost.
Well-known orchestrator patterns: planner+executor, supervisor pattern from LangGraph, the 'manager' role in CrewAI. Implementation differs but the concept is consistent: one agent that owns the overall plan and many that execute pieces.