Orchestrator
The top-level component in a multi-agent system responsible for receiving goals, decomposing them into tasks, assigning tasks to appropriate agents, monitoring progress, and handling failures and escalations.
The orchestrator is the conductor of the multi-agent orchestra. It maintains a global view of the task graph—which tasks are pending, in progress, blocked, or complete—while individual agents have only a local view of their current assignment. This separation of concerns enables the orchestrator to re-route tasks around failures without agents needing awareness of each other.
Orchestrators can be implemented as a dedicated agent (typically a strong model like Opus 4.7 running a planning + routing loop), as a deterministic state machine (for well-defined pipelines), or as a hybrid (a state machine for normal flow, an agent for exception handling). Pure state machine orchestrators are cheaper and more reliable for known-good pipelines; agent orchestrators are more flexible for novel task types.
In Paperclip, the CEO agent acts as the primary orchestrator: it receives company-level goals, translates them into projects and tasks, assigns them to chiefs, and monitors status via Langfuse dashboards. Chiefs act as sub-orchestrators within their domains, delegating to worker agents and aggregating results.