{
  "id": "orchestrator-workers",
  "code": "PTL-0068",
  "term": "Orchestrator-Workers",
  "aliases": [
    "subagents",
    "multi-agent orchestration",
    "supervisor pattern"
  ],
  "category": "agents",
  "definition": "Orchestrator-workers is a pattern in which a central model dynamically breaks a task into subtasks, delegates them to worker model calls or subagents, and synthesizes their results.",
  "description": "Unlike parallelization, the subtasks are not fixed in advance but decided by the orchestrator for each input, which suits tasks such as multi-file code changes or broad research.",
  "example": null,
  "broader": [
    "agentic-workflow"
  ],
  "narrower": [],
  "related": [
    "ai-agent",
    "parallelization",
    "meta-prompting"
  ],
  "introduced": null,
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "Building effective agents",
      "authors": "Anthropic",
      "year": 2024,
      "url": "https://www.anthropic.com/research/building-effective-agents"
    }
  ],
  "url": "https://protologue.com/t/orchestrator-workers/",
  "citation": "Protologue. (2026). Orchestrator-Workers. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0068). https://protologue.com/t/orchestrator-workers/"
}