Orchestration

Multi-agent orchestration breaks faster than it scales.

Multi-agent systems fail not because the agents are wrong but because the coordination layer has no design doctrine. Work disappears into conversation streams. Handoffs become implicit. Recovery is guesswork. The Blueprint gives you the doctrine to fix that.

Key Facts

Related principles: 4
Curated examples: 7
Cluster: Orchestration
Runtime guides: 3

Why it breaks

Work reduced to a conversation

When complex delegated work is represented only as a message stream, governance collapses. Dependencies, concurrency, and intermediate state become invisible.

Handoffs are implicit

State is lost between agents when handoff boundaries carry no explicit structure. Recovery requires guessing what the previous agent knew.

Control is lost at scale

Concurrency, approvals, and failure propagation outpace the conversation model. Teams lose the ability to redirect, interrupt, or recover without a steering layer.

The doctrine

Four principles govern orchestrated systems. Principle 9 is the anchor.

Principle 9

Represent delegated work as a system, not merely as a conversation

Where work involves multiple steps, agents, dependencies, or concurrent activities, it should be represented as a structured system rather than solely as a message stream.

Principle 1

Design for delegation rather than direct manipulation

Principle 8

Make hand-offs, approvals, and blockers explicit

Principle 10

Optimise for steering, not only initiating

See the orchestration cluster

Start with these examples

Seven examples mapped to orchestration patterns — from deterministic routing to full multi-agent delegation.

Browse all examples

When it becomes a runtime problem

Orchestration stops being only a prompt or design problem when concurrent agents need visibility boundaries, control flow needs to be auditable, failure propagation can cross system boundaries, human checkpoints require explicit approval surfaces, and observability needs to extend beyond the conversation layer. The runtime architecture guides cover concurrency, context hubs, and safety boundaries for exactly these cases.

Runtime architecture guides

Your coding agent can pull orchestration-relevant patterns on demand. Connect Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot to the Blueprint MCP endpoint and ask it to retrieve principles or examples by topic.

Set up MCP

Explore the orchestration cluster Browse examples