Manager-Worker
A multi-agent setup where one agent plans and delegates while others do the actual tasks.
Think of it like
A head chef calling out orders while the line cooks each handle their station.
Example
A manager agent breaks “research these five companies” into five jobs and hands one to each worker, then stitches their findings together.
How it actually works
This is the most common multi-agent pattern because it mirrors how human teams work: one planner, several doers. It parallelizes cleanly and keeps each worker’s context small and focused. The cost is that the manager becomes the bottleneck and single point of failure — if it plans badly, the whole team executes the wrong thing efficiently.
For product teams
It’s the natural shape for splitting big jobs, but the manager’s judgment gates the whole team’s output.
For engineers
A supervisor agent decomposes and dispatches subtasks to worker agents, then aggregates their results.
Related
- Delegation — The act of handing work down.
- Orchestration — Coordinating the whole team.
- Swarm — A flatter alternative with no boss.
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