Hierarchical Pattern (the "Supervisor" Pattern): One Orchestrator, Many Workers
~12 min read
A top-level planner agent delegates subtasks to workers, tracks their progress, and makes the final calls — exactly like a manager and their team. The book calls this 'Hierarchical'; it's commonly also called the Supervisor pattern.
Hierarchical Pattern (the "Supervisor" Pattern): One Orchestrator, Many Workers is a Pro topic
Sign in, then upgrade to Pro or Power to unlock this topic and the full AI Engineering curriculum.
Key points
- •A top-level planner/manager agent delegates subtasks to workers, tracks progress, and makes final calls — 'exactly like a manager and their team'
- •The book calls this 'Hierarchical'; it's also commonly known as the 'Supervisor' pattern — same architecture, different name
- •Functionally the same as Level 4 (Multi-agent pattern) in the 5 levels of agentic AI, described from the pattern-taxonomy angle
- •Unlike Sequential's fixed order or Parallel's fixed split, the manager adapts delegation based on what earlier workers actually returned
- •Trade-off: the manager becomes a bottleneck and single point of failure, and every delegation decision costs an extra LLM call