4 Things Your Claude Code Orchestrator Needs to Be Useful

If you're building orchestrator agents (agents that manage other agents) with Claude Code, four components separate a useful one from a chaotic one. Here's what I've learned from months of building them.

1. A Mission Document

Don't let your orchestrator rely on default model intelligence. Write a "mission document" — a job description that defines what to do, how to do it, and when to escalate. For a bug-report orchestrator, that might be:

• Check email for messages with "customer feedback" in subject
• File a ticket locally
• Spawn a child agent to reproduce the bug and implement a fix using compound engineering (or another plugin like superpowers or GSD)
• Alert me when it's ready for QA

You don't touch it until step 4. Best case it saves you time; worst case the code gets tossed.

2. A Heartbeat (Loop)

An orchestrator without a loop is just a one-shot script. The real power is cadence — re-read the mission document on a schedule (every 10 minutes, every hour, whatever fits). Most agent CLIs offer a loop or cron primitive. Each tick, the orchestrator checks for new work, monitors progress on existing tasks, and acts on whatever the mission says to do next.

3. Inter-Agent Communication

Your orchestrator holds context you didn't load into the children. It can answer their questions, coordinate approaches between them, or run adversarial reviews where one agent checks another's work. Implementation can be simple: a shared markdown file with structured rules, a message-passing tool, or a backchannel system. The mechanism matters less than making sure the channel exists.

4. Auditable Control

Build your orchestrator to produce records: what it decided, what it spawned, what the children produced. You need to be able to jump into any child agent, review its work, and interrupt it at any point. Visibility into everything is the only way to be confident in the output — you are responsible for all of it.

These principles apply whether you use the tool shown in the original video or any other agent tooling. You can build an orchestrator with whatever you're already using.