Agents & Orchestration
Explain what agents are, where they are appropriate and how autonomous systems should be structured.
Why This Matters
Most teams reach for an agent before they have a workflow. Orchestration is how you decide autonomy, human gates, and failure handling before the model starts looping.
Architecture Position
Agents occupy the Agent Layer and the Experience Layer. Planning, orchestration, and tool use happen here; durable execution belongs to the Runtime Layer. See it on the architecture map.
Start Here
Building Enterprise AI Agents
Production harness: runtime, orchestration, tools, memory, RAG, security, observability, and production controls.
Context Engineering
17 prompt and context engineering techniques for building reliable AI systems.
Trip Planner Agent
A practical multi-agent walkthrough — planning, execution, and coordination patterns.
Core Concepts
Fundamentals
- What is an agent?
- Agent vs workflow
- Agent vs assistant
- Levels of autonomy
Agent Loop
- Observe
- Reason
- Act
- Evaluate
Patterns
- ReAct
- Router
- Planner / Executor
- Supervisor / Worker
- Reflection
Orchestration
- Sequential execution
- Parallel execution
- Event-driven agents
- Dynamic workflows
Multi-Agent
- Agent delegation
- Handoffs
- Coordination
- Shared state
- Specialist agents
Human Control
- Human-in-the-loop
- Human-on-the-loop
- Approval gates
Failure
- Goal drift
- Infinite loops
- Tool misuse
- Excessive autonomy
Advanced
Advanced material
Deeper guides for this domain are on the way.
Coming SoonArchitecture Patterns
Applied patterns for this domain live in the pattern library.
Browse architecture patternsCase Studies
Enterprise walkthroughs that apply this topic in a full system.
Browse case studiesRelated Topics
Agent Runtimes & Harnesses
The runtime as the boundary between probabilistic reasoning and deterministic enterprise execution.
Open →Context Engineering
How information is assembled, prioritized, and supplied to models and agents.
Open →Memory & State
Context vs memory vs state — the most confused layer of agent architecture.
Open →AI Security & Trust
Threats created by probabilistic systems that retrieve data and take actions.
Open →Roadmaps
This topic appears in the Enterprise AI Architect path.
Follow the Enterprise AI Architect roadmap