Agentic Systems: From Single Agent to Orchestration

Short summary

Single agents fail when tasks need multiple reasoning modes, suffer from context pollution, tool overload, and no separation of concerns. Multi-agent orchestration addresses this with four main patterns: sequential pipelines, concurrent fan-out/fan-in, handoff transfers, and hierarchical coordinator-worker setups. The article includes a working Rust example of a coordinator that decomposes requests and dispatches to specialized worker agents concurrently.

• •Single agents break down due to context pollution, tool overload, and lack of separation of concerns
• •Four orchestration patterns: sequential, concurrent, handoff, and hierarchical coordinator-worker
• •Frameworks like LangGraph, CrewAI, and OpenAI Agents SDK all implement the same underlying patterns with different structure levels

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