Phase 1: Topologies & Roles · ~75 minutes · Python (stdlib · `threading`)

Supervisor / Orchestrator-Worker Pattern

One lead agent plans and delegates; specialized workers execute in parallel contexts and report back.

Hiring signal: Can operate supervisor / orchestrator-worker pattern in production

Introduction

This is the pattern behind Anthropic's Research system (Claude Opus 4 as lead, Sonnet 4 as subagents), measured at +90.2% over single-agent Opus 4 on internal research evals. Anthropic's engineering post reports that 80% of the variance on BrowseComp is explained by token usage alone — multi-agent wins largely because each subagent gets a fresh context window. This lesson builds the supervisor pattern from the primitives and covers the 2026 engineering lessons from production deployments.

Type: Learn + Build Languages: Python (stdlib, threading) Prerequisites: Phase 16 · 04 (Primitive Model) Time: ~75 minutes

Objective

Learning objectives

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You've read the first 2 sections. The rest of this lesson covers The Problem, The Concept, Build, Check Yourself, Key Terms & Next — plus a hands-on lab, quiz, and project artifact.

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Key terms in this lesson

Agent