The Art of Agent Orchestration

Managing AI agents is not like managing humans, and pretending otherwise is a recipe for disaster. Humans bring context, initiative, and the ability to say "this feels wrong." Agents bring speed, consistency, and the ability to follow instructions with terrifying precision -- including bad instructions.

The art of agent orchestration is really the art of context engineering. An agent is only as good as the context it receives. Give it a vague prompt and you get vague output. Give it a precise, well-structured prompt with clear constraints, examples, and success criteria, and you get output that rivals or exceeds what a human would produce. The skill is not in using the AI. It is in preparing the ground for the AI to succeed.

We have spent two years refining our orchestration system. Here is what we have learned: the most important investment is not in the agents themselves but in the protocols that govern their interaction. Which agent reviews which agent's work. How errors are caught and corrected. When to escalate to a human. How context flows between stages of a project. These protocols are the real intellectual property. The agents are commodities. The orchestration is the moat.

One counterintuitive lesson: smaller, specialized agents outperform large, general-purpose ones almost every time. A coding agent that only handles frontend React components will produce better work than a general coding agent asked to do the same task. Specialization allows for more precise context, tighter constraints, and better quality control. It mirrors how expert human teams work -- you want a cardiologist, not a general practitioner, when your heart is involved.

The biggest mistake new practitioners make is trusting agent output without verification. We run every piece of agent-generated code through MANIAC -- our autonomous testing system -- before it reaches production. Not because the agents are bad. Because even the best agent, like the best human developer, produces code that sometimes has bugs. The difference is that automated testing at scale catches issues that human code review misses.

Agent orchestration is an emerging discipline. It is part software architecture, part management science, part quality assurance. And it is becoming the most valuable skill in technology.