Orchestration — supervisor, swarm, hierarchical, debate
supervisor-worker
super
refund
bug
sales
central router dispatches; specialists don't talk to each other
LangGraph create_supervisor / Anthropic orchestrator-workers
2026: direct tool calls preferred for context control
swarm peer-to-peer
refund
bug
sales
direct handoffs via shared tools; no central router
lower latency; harder to reason about
hop counter required to avoid bouncing A B A
hierarchical nested subgraphs
top
ops
commercial
refund
bug
sales
only when supervisor context budget fails
debate proposer + critique
alpha
beta
gamma
synth
most expensive; best for hard reasoning + factuality
pick problem first, topology second. Anthropic: "the right system, not the most sophisticated."