Orchestration

Patterns for coordinating multi-agent work in Claude Code.

Inspired by claude-sneakpeek orchestration skill. Thanks to Mike Kelly for the original concepts.

Quick Start

Spawn parallel background agents with model selection:

Task(subagent_type="general-purpose", model="haiku", run_in_background=true, prompt="CONTEXT: You are a WORKER agent. Complete ONLY this task. Do NOT spawn sub-agents. Report results with absolute paths. TASK: Read src/auth/ and summarize the authentication approach.")

Two Modes

Mode Use When

Subagents (Task tool) Independent work, no peer communication needed

Teams (TeamCreate ) Agents need to message each other, long-running

Default to subagents. Escalate to teams when agents must collaborate.

Core Concepts

• Conductor pattern: Decompose, delegate, synthesize. Never execute yourself.

• Model selection: haiku (fetching/lookup), sonnet (implementation), opus (architecture)

• Worker preamble: Always include "do not spawn sub-agents" in agent prompts

• File partitioning: Never assign same file to multiple agents

References

• patterns.md - 6 orchestration patterns (fan-out, pipeline, map-reduce, speculative, background, task-graph)

• domains.md - 8 domain-specific decomposition guides

• task-management.md - Task dependencies, graph walking, file partitioning