Orchestrate

Multi-agent orchestration

Overview

Decompose -> waves -> reduce -> gate.

Provider-specific adapter definitions and installer mechanics are owned by their adapter and installer surfaces; discover their current capabilities at runtime.

Rules

• Use parallel fan-out only after the decomposition/value gate passes.
• Preflight dependencies/shared errors.
• No concurrent shared-state writes. Partition authorised writers into repository .worktrees/<task-agent>; otherwise use a serial applier.
• Parallel lanes stop ready-to-merge. The chair merges serially, refreshes the next branch from current main, then reruns checks and reviews after commit/tree changes.
• Keep topology exact. One chair; leaders settle recursive obligations. Handoff is a generation-bound operator action.
• Answer-bearing external work uses a cooperative Fabric request/reply where available; Herdr only observes or sends fire-and-forget steering. A normal Fabric inbox read claims delivery; acknowledge after durable processing to prevent redelivery. Claim/ack and a correlated reply evidence delivery, not provider liveness or completion. Without a round trip, record FABRIC-ROUNDTRIP-UNAVAILABLE and collect a named artifact.
• Record worker cwd; never assume repository.
• Workers write full output to files; return a digest/path.
• A worker's report is a claim, not evidence. Confirm claimed commits in git log, claimed counts against its own transcript, and re-run any failure it calls environmental. Lanes routinely report a clean result their own output contradicts.
• Liveness: size proves nothing. Compare CPU and session-log mtime; see worker-liveness.md. No growth keeps a live worker in the waiting path, but growth is not proof either: a wrapper can sit blocked long after its child exited. A detached task is not dead, and a live wrapper is not working. Observed PID exit is what fences terminal reporting, inspection and reuse.
• Cross-family follows the HARNESS risk ladder. Targeted lenses plus other primary; family separation is required only for the assurance claim being made, not for ordinary execution. Record terminal skips.
• Configured workspace execution has broad provider choice. An authorised chair may dispatch ordinary workspace work to any configured provider family; execution freedom is bounded by credential/auth-store exclusions, unrelated path containment, explicit denials, write/resource limits and external-action gates.
• Objective checks outrank opinions. You own the final call.
• Discover current model/tool options at runtime.

When This Pays

Before parallel dispatch, require independent information or artefacts; stable interfaces and dependencies; non-overlapping writes; independently checkable return contracts; and expected information gain greater than coordination, shared-state and tool-density cost.

If the gate fails, keep serial ownership with the chair or one specialist; shared-error or tightly coupled work stays serial. Choose the smallest passing topology.

Adaptive Loop

1. Preflight authority/isolation/disclosure/receipts.
2. Use native same-session subagents first. Ordinary configured-provider CLI dispatch may use same-family routes. The current cf_dispatch.sh distinct-family requirement belongs to its assurance path; ordinary dispatch is owned by scripts/dispatch_run.py and may use same-family routes.
3. Dispatch parallel read/partitioned-write and serial shared-state waves; adapt leaders on evidence and keep one chair/stage owner.
4. Reduce to a claim/conflict map; verify the live tree before repair.
5. Add only informative waves: narrow, repair, verify, cross-family broad review, or Document update wave.
6. Final gate: no untriaged P0/P1, missing anchors, unresolved doc drift, unrecorded family status or user gate. Record CROSS-FAMILY-NOT-RUN when unavailable.

Worker Contract

Every worker gets identity, objective, authority, paths, output, checks, stop and budget. Where an adapter exposes them, record task class and route (tier, model, effort, receipt); an ordinary alias-only route records its alias and capability limit. Validate payloads, never infer permission. See orchestration-contract.md.

Autonomous-implementation mode

Pulls accepted/ready issues through implement unattended; merge stays user-controlled, deferring to the nearest repository merge policy. Lower authority than autopilot's run-until-STOP loop. See autonomous-implementation.md.

References

Load relevant references only: trigger-boundary.md, routing-and-tiers.md, codex-subagents.md, orchestration-contract.md, dynamic-workflows.md, paired-primary.md, herdr-panes.md, layering-and-context.md, retrieval-and-tool-routing.md, verification.md, cli-headless.md, memory-scratchpad.md, evaluation-and-observability.md, domain-adaptation.md, worker-liveness.md, and autonomous-implementation.md. scripts/ and evals/ hold helpers/guards; cf_dispatch.sh is the direct provider-execution adapter. When Fabric coordination is unavailable, record its result as a named degraded artifact; it is not itself a Fabric round trip.

Portable artifact

Use the skill-owned coordination summary schema.