What is Agent Orchestration?
Agentic AIThe coordination layer that decides which agent gets which task, in what order, and under what budget. Orchestration is where multi-agent systems succeed or loop.
Why It Matters
Splitting work across agents is the easy part. The coordination is where multi-agent systems live or die: who decomposes the goal, who assigns the pieces, who notices when two agents start passing the same task back and forth forever. That layer is orchestration, and it is usually the last thing designed and the first thing to fail.
The orchestration layer also owns the money. Budgets per task, per agent, per run live here or nowhere, and when they live nowhere, coordination failures become billing incidents.
The Two Orchestration Shapes
Centralized orchestrator. One component decomposes the goal, assigns work, sequences dependencies, and decides when the run is done. Auditable and predictable, but the orchestrator is a single point of both failure and bottleneck.
Peer handoffs. Agents pass work to each other directly, with no single owner of the overall run. Flexible and resilient to one agent dying, but the failure modes hide between the agents where nobody is watching the whole.
Most production systems mix the two: an orchestrator owns the plan while agents hand subtasks to each other inside it.
Where It Breaks
The documented failures are coordination failures. A LangChain A2A setup burned $47K in eleven days when two agents kept delegating the same task to each other; every individual trace looked green. No loop detection, no handoff budget, no termination condition that fired.
The subtler break is the invisible run: each agent reports success on its slice while the composed outcome is wrong. Orchestration that only tracks task completion never sees it.
How Flytebit Handles It
Multi-agent builds at Flytebit bound the coordination layer, not just the agents: explicit termination conditions, handoff budgets, loop detection across the task graph, and trajectory capture that spans the entire run rather than one agent’s slice. The incident catalog these controls respond to is in Agentic AI Horror Stories, and the governed build is our agentic AI systems work.