AI Systems Atlas

H-10Hierarchical Agent

/harnesses/hierarchical

A manager agent decomposes the goal and delegates to specialized workers, integrating their reports.

Step-by-step walkthrough4 steps
  1. The manager decomposes the goal into scoped subtasks.
  2. Workers run with narrow contexts — each sees only its slice.
  3. Compressed reports flow back up; raw context stays below.
  4. The manager integrates. Depth costs latency; every hop loses detail.
Key insight

The hierarchy is really a context architecture: each level compresses detail before passing it up, so no single context holds everything.

Failure mode

Compression loss: every report is a lossy summary. Critical detail dies in the middle of the org chart, same as in human ones.

Further reading
RelatedParallel swarmMulti-agent codingAgent handoffsShared blackboard

Elsewhere in the atlas

Security →Evals →Context →Coding Agents →Tools →Ops →