> Buried in the chaos are sketches of future agent orchestration patterns
I'm not sure if there are that many. We need to be vigilant of "it feels useful & powerful", because it's so easy to feel that way.
When I write complex plans, I can tell Claude to spawn agents for each task and I can successfully 1-shot a 30-60 minute implementation.
I've toyed with more complicated patterns, but unlike this speculative fiction, I did need my result both simple and working.
A couple of times now I've had to spend a lot of hours trying to unfuck a design i let slip through. The kind where 1 agent injects some duplicate code/architecture pattern into the system that's correct enough not to be flagged, but wrong enough to forever trip up every subsequent fresh agents that stumble on it.
I tell people my job now is to kick these things every 15 minutes. Its a kinda joke kinda not. But they definitely need kicking. Without, the decoherence of a non-trivial project is too high, and you still need time to know; where and how to kick.
I'm not sure what I'd need to be convinced a higher level of orchestration can do that. I do like to try new things. But my spider-sense is telling me this is a Collatz-conjecture-esque dead-end. People get the feeling of making giant leaps of progress, which anybody using these things should be familiar with by now, but something valuable is always just out of reach with the tools we currently have.
There are some big gains by guiding agents/users to use more sub agents with a clean context - perhaps with some more knobs - but I'd advise against acting under the assumption using grander orchestration tools will inevitably have a positive ROI.