Problem 12 of 15 in the Harnessing Agentic AI Systems series — read the index for the framing. Previous: Dynamic Tool Discovery Pattern · Next: Blackboard Pattern.
The Problem — Dividing a workflow across agents
No single context can hold a whole workflow. The work must be divided, delegated, and handed off — and the frontier has added the contract that makes delegation safe (F2).
| Field | P13 — Orchestrator-Worker (pattern) | A11 — The God Agent (anti-pattern) | F2 — Sprint Contracts (frontier) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forces / Smell | Context limits vs a single plan; specialists vs oversight; termination vs conversation. | One massive agent, immense prompt, every phase in one context window. | Specification vs latitude; criteria vs freedom. |
| Solution / Anti-solution | Direct traffic using a highly capable central agent that delegates atomic sub-tasks to smaller, faster, specialized agents. | "One agent, all context, total control." | Before each sprint, generator and evaluator negotiate what "done" looks like — and how success will be verified — before any code is written. |
| Consequences / Failure | Bounded contexts, parallelizable work, a plan-then-execute shape. | Context avalanche and lost-in-the-middle degradation by construction — the window degrades as it fills. | Ambiguity resolved at the moment of maximum leverage; the agent defines the verifier before the artifact. |
| Tradeoffs / Refactoring | The orchestrator is a single point of failure; spec errors cascade; handoffs can lose state; termination must be a system property. | P13 with decomposition and handoff: one feature at a time, structured artifacts between sessions. | Negotiation overhead — bounded by keeping the contract to a sprint-sized chunk. |
| Evidence | AutoGen (paper); Anthropic's planner-generator-evaluator (post); DeepSeek's subagent registry (DeepSeek teardown). | CrewAI's crews argument (docs). | Anthropic's harness (post). |
| Related | Refactoring for A11; composes with P16 and F2. | Is the absence of P13; composes A4 and A8. | Composes with P13 and F1. |
Discussion
Delegation is how a system outgrows one context window: the orchestrator curates a delegation tree instead of drowning in context. The single point of failure is the orchestrator — the spec must stay high-level because errors cascade downstream, and termination must be a system property, not the conversation's. The god agent fails by construction; F2 makes each delegation safe by negotiating "done" before the work exists.
Key Insight
No single context can hold a workflow. Delegation is how systems scale, the spec must stay high-level because errors cascade, and termination is a system property, not a conversation's. One window holding every phase degrades exactly as the middle fills.
References
AutoGen (arXiv:2308.08155); CrewAI crews (docs); Anthropic, Harness design for long-running application development (post); archive: DeepSeek teardown, harness canon.