Subagent Orchestration Workflow

I want to break down a high level orchestration workflow, and explain its benefits. I am going to use Claude Code for my examples, but these concepts apply to Cursor and any other modern agentic programming technology.

The Inline Agent Workflow

The inline agent workflow looks like a procedural call and response type interaction, similar to being in the navigator in a pair programming duo.

The workflow is to execute on work with an agent by working through a list of tasks with the agent, who writes code, creates commits, reviews code, and pushes the code. This has obvious issues. Context becomes contaminated quickly, as the agent is responsible for consecutive rounds of focused work items. The first task gets a clean context. The second task shares that context with the residue of the first. By the third, the agent is working through the noise of two unrelated tasks to focus on the one that matters.

The large language model powering these tools is autoregressive; every new token attends to the full conversation history. As the context grows with each completed task, irrelevant work from earlier tasks is still present and influencing the model's output.

The Subagent Orchestration Workflow

The subagent orchestration workflow consists of an orchestrator agent — who the user is interfacing with directly — who intelligently orchestrates subagents to execute on work items.

Instead of working through tasks sequentially in a single conversation, the orchestrator dispatches each task to an independent subagent with a clean context scoped to that unit of work. The subagent receives only what it needs: the task description, the relevant project context, and a dedicated working directory. It does its work, writes its output, and returns. The orchestrator never writes code itself. It coordinates, tracks state, and decides what to dispatch next. Multiple subagents can run in parallel when their tasks are independent, and each one operates without any awareness of the others.

This also changes how review works. In the single agent workflow, the same agent that wrote the code reviews it, so it's poorly positioned to find the gaps in it. In the orchestration workflow, review is dispatched to separate subagents who never saw the implementation. They arrive with a clean context, a specific review mandate, and no attachment to the decisions that were made.

To structure your work, you will have subagents create tickets for work items that include descriptive context of the issue and location of relevant documentation. This allows the orchestrator to dispatch agents to work on particular tickets, and also gives the reviewer and orchestrator some information to work with. This also opens up the opportunity to parallelize work if we would like to.

The other benefit we get here is that the orchestrator isn't devoid of context, it still retains the overall context of the process of organizing and executing on work and intelligently dispatching subagents as needed for work or to solve issues as they arise.

Conclusion

The single agent workflow works fine for small, isolated tasks. But as the scope of work grows, structural limitations can become a problem. Asking one agent to execute on all work sequentially, results in context contamination, and self-review bias. The orchestration model doesn't eliminate these problems by being smarter. It eliminates them by not creating the conditions for them in the first place.