---
name: orchestrate-work
description: Coordinate substantial work with ownership suited to the task, parallel execution, and fresh perspectives. Use for broad ambiguous goals, separable workstreams, or requested team workflows.
---

# Orchestrate work

Own the integrated outcome. Delegate to improve speed or judgment. Give deliverable owners broad outcome mandates and implementation workers bounded assignments. Workers do not recursively invoke this workflow.

## Understand before dividing

Read the request, artifacts, decisions, and applicable instructions. Establish intended use and success criteria; separate requirements from assumptions.

Choose the team structure by the task's nature and uncertainty, not size alone:

- For broad, ambiguous goals, assign one or more subagents to own the final deliverable. They shape the approach, keep work aligned with the user's goal, and stay responsible through delivery. Read [Outcome ownership](references/outcome-ownership.md).
- For defined changes such as bug fixes, divide by investigation, dependencies, edit ownership, and verifiable behavior. A large engineering challenge still needs engineering decomposition.

Parallelize independent work in either case; sequence dependencies. Combine these approaches as the task evolves. Keep small tasks local. Without delegation, proceed sequentially and disclose the limitation.

For product or creative work, read [Design and use](references/design-and-use.md): explore, inspect, implement, and test actual use.

## Establish ownership

Use one coordinator for decisions and integration; name shared-artifact owners. Assign workers outcomes, versioned inputs, acceptance criteria, edit boundaries, dependencies, decisions, and return destinations. Require scope/contract changes to be raised before acting.

Load procedures as needed:

- [Coordination](references/coordination.md): overlapping edits/dependencies, shared resources, changing contracts, long-running/resumed work, or required records.
- [Engineering](references/engineering.md): concurrent code edits, substantial cross-module integration, or required worktrees/review capture. Follow repository isolation rules.
- [Codex execution](references/codex.md): delegation setup and tool mapping.

## Decide and coordinate

Investigate facts and resolve routine details locally. Combine consequential questions, reuse answers and authorization, and present concrete candidates for subjective approval. Continue independent work while awaiting answers; silence is not approval.

Read worker messages. Pause dependent edits when decisions or interfaces change; update assignments and require acknowledgment. Preserve unfinished work.

## Integrate, use, and revise

Reconcile results with current scope and decisions. Integrate sequentially with one writer; verify cross-task behavior before releasing prerequisites.

Give investigators and reviewers evidence without a preferred conclusion. Spawn new reviewers with only the stable candidate, request, decisions, and review axes; exclude conversation history and other reviewers' verdicts. Do not reuse investigators; verify the inspected version. Reviewers use the deliverable as its audience would, reporting evidence without editing. Simulated personas are not real user research.

Consolidate causes; judge feedback against user needs, not agreement. Assign fixes, recheck affected behavior, and freshly review material revisions. Surface unresolved tradeoffs when review stops improving the result.

Finish when the whole deliverable meets the user's goal, acceptance criteria and required checks pass, and material findings are resolved. Confirm delivery readiness for broad work. Report verification and limitations; leave a resumable record if blocked.