Agent Orchestration

Multi-agent systems fail two ways: teams split work across agents that a single capable agent handles better (paying latency, cost, and failure surface for nothing), or they wire agents together with vague handoffs and no budgets, producing loops that burn tokens until someone notices the bill. This skill designs the coordination layer - topology, contracts, budgets - so agent count is justified and every failure mode has a pre-decided response.

Operating procedure

Step 1: Gather inputs

• The end-to-end task and the acceptance criteria for its final output.
• Why one agent is insufficient - name the specific failure (context overflow, skill mismatch, needed parallelism). If the user cannot name one, the answer is one agent, and this design is over.
• Volume of context the task consumes vs the model's window; latency and cost ceilings per run.
• Which steps have side effects (writes, sends, purchases) vs are pure reads.

Step 2: Justify each agent

Split only when at least one holds: