A8Advanced 60 minutes reading and codeLocked

Orchestration Patterns: Supervisor, Swarm, Hierarchical

Four orchestration patterns recur across 2026 frameworks: supervisor-worker, swarm / peer-to-peer, hierarchical, debate. Anthropic's guidance: "It's about building the right system for your needs." Start simple; add topology only when a single agent plus five workflow patterns is insufficient.

In this lesson

  1. 01Learning Objectives
  2. 02The Problem
  3. 03The Concept
  4. 04Build it
  5. 05Use it
  6. 06Exercises
  7. 07Key Terms
  8. 08Further Reading

About 900 words of reading, with code, 7 quiz questions and the tutor.

The full lesson opens with an access code

You can see what this lesson covers and the milestone it sets. The full text, code, quizzes, the tutor and the AI reviews come with the K850 practice, along with weekly build sessions and code review.

Codes come with the K850 practice. Book a place

Milestone forAn observable back-office agent

Choose the orchestration, justify it

Decide whether matching, invoicing and debt-chasing are one agent, a pipeline or specialist agents with a supervisor. Build the choice and write down what you gave up.

Done when

  • An architecture decision record comparing at least two orchestrations
  • The chosen orchestration running end to end on the sample month
  • One failure case the alternative would handle better, demonstrated

Stretch: Implement the alternative and compare trajectory scores

Reviews open with an access code.

Interview practice

Questions on this topic that AI engineering interviews ask, with the companies reported to ask them. Answer the way you would out loud; Jev scores it and DeepSeek tells you what to add.

Scoring opens with an access code. You can still read the questions and prepare.

Adapted from open-source work: AI Engineering from Scratch by Rohit Ghumare (MIT, lesson text, code and quizzes); Awesome LLM Apps by Shubham Saboo (Apache-2.0, starter code); AI Engineering Interview Questions by Outcome School (Apache-2.0, interview questions). Capstones, milestones, data packs and Zambian context by Zambrite.

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