The Orchestrator

If you have read this far, you do not need another definition of orchestrator. You need a place to start on Monday. The question I get most often after talking about this material comes from someone who already runs a process — a support queue, a weekly report, a release — and it is some version of that. Most of them have already tried. They opened a chat window, pasted in a day’s worth of the problem, and got back something impressive that they could not put into service, because nothing around it was built to receive it. That gap is where this chapter starts, and it is why the advice begins with the process rather than with a tool.

So begin with work you already understand rather than by collecting agents. Find a process that matters to you — customer support, inventory, a website, a production line, a claims queue, or the software that runs a small business — and ask what the business is actually trying to accomplish. Ask where information gets lost, where people repeat the same investigation, and where one specialist has become the only person who knows how to make a change. Then ask what a system could investigate, build, test, or maintain on behalf of the people doing that work.

The question that matters is not “what can this model do?” It is “what could this system do reliably enough to be useful, and what would we need to see before we trusted it?”