AI Orchestration Patterns: From Single Agents to Agent Swarms

Automation can help when recurring work is clear enough to describe, review, and improve. The mistake is treating orchestration as magic instead of as a set of agreements.

Useful patterns include checklists, handoff rules, review queues, scoped tool access, and escalation paths. If a system cannot explain what it is doing or ask for help when the boundary is reached, it is not ready to own the workflow.