Orchestrator

The Orchestrator is the central component in an agent swarm architecture that coordinates specialized agents (sub-agents). It decides which agent executes each pipeline step, passes results between agents, and manages error recovery. In Claude Code, you can implement the orchestrator as the main agent using planning mode to delegate tasks to sub-agents. In Dify, the orchestrator becomes a visual flow graph. The orchestrator follows a divide-and-conquer approach, breaking complex SEO tasks (like a full semantic audit) into smaller steps and assigns them to specialists.

The key principle is that the orchestrator coordinates workflow but delegates actual execution — it manages the process while sub-agents perform the work. For example, in an SEO audit: the orchestrator assigns step 1 to the crawler agent (collect URLs), step 2 to the embedding agent (generate vectors), step 3 to the clustering agent (group topics), and step 4 to the reporting agent (generate results). This pattern becomes essential for pipelines with branching logic and conditional decision-making beyond simple linear execution.