Decoder. plain-English AI glossary

Supervisor Agent

▲ Rising

The agent that assigns work to other agents and checks what they hand back.

Think of it like

A team lead who breaks up the project, parcels out tasks, and reviews everyone’s work before it ships.

Example

A supervisor agent splits a research brief into three questions, dispatches a worker per question, then reviews and merges their findings.

How it actually works

The supervisor holds the overall goal and state, decides who does what, and decides when the job is done — a hub-and-spoke pattern that keeps workers simple. Its risk is being a single point of confusion: if its judgment about task completion or quality is off, every worker below it inherits the error. It trades coordination overhead for focus.

For product teams

The pattern that makes a swarm of agents accountable to one plan.

For engineers

An orchestrating agent that decomposes tasks, delegates to worker agents, and evaluates their outputs against the goal.

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