Coordinator Responsibilities

In a multi-agent system, Claude orchestration follows a hub-and-spoke shape: one coordinator at the hub, several subagents on the spokes. The coordinator never does the deep work itself — it manages the work.

A coordinator has exactly five responsibilities you must master for the exam:

• Decompose — split a task into subtasks
• Delegate — hand each subtask to a subagent
• Aggregate — merge subagent results
• Route — send work to the right specialist
• Handle errors — recover or escalate failures

This lesson walks through each, with the patterns and anti-patterns that separate a passing answer from a plausible distractor.

The single most tested coordinator fact: subagents do NOT inherit the coordinator's conversation history. Each subagent is a fresh Claude context.

The model keeps no state between turns or across agents. Whatever a subagent needs to do its job — the user's goal, prior findings, constraints, IDs — must be passed explicitly inside that subagent's prompt.

Forgetting this is a classic failure: the coordinator 'knows' the customer ID or the research question, assumes the subagent does too, and the subagent fabricates or stalls. Context isolation is a feature (it keeps focus tight), but it puts the burden of context-passing squarely on the coordinator.