orchestration multi-agents

Williams frames it as three coupled dials: cost, set by model choice; wall-clock time, set by parallelization width; and precision, set by contract quality. Widening parallelism without clean partitions degrades precision and multiplies merge conflicts, so parallelism only improves cost-efficiency at constant precision when the work partition is clean.

The architectural line Williams draws is "control flow is code; judgment is models". Scheduling decisions stay in deterministic scripts; frontier models are reserved for places where judgment is genuinely required. That splits into four specialized lanes: a Contract Desk on a frontier model drafting the contracts, a Builder Pool with single-writer discipline per partition, a shared Prosecution Pool running on fresh contexts, and a sequential Integrator Lane. Model tier routing follows rail density, an escalation ladder on failure, and DAG float analysis of the critical path. Four signals predict merge conflicts before any work starts: file scope overlap, import-graph radius, historical co-change coupling, and namespace collisions. The width that forecast certifies typically lands between three and five agents; past that, collision risk cancels the gain.

Anthropic's 2026 agentic coding trends report registers the same shift from single-agent systems to coordinated multi-agent teams, and names multi-agent coordination a 2026 priority. At Fountain, hierarchical orchestration cut logistics-center staffing from over a week to under 72 hours. Wenvision sells the operational side: task routing, state management, dependency coordination, failure recovery, parallel execution of independent agents.