Supervisor Agent
Also known as: Orchestrator Agent, Manager Agent, Meta-Agent
Definition
An agent whose primary role is to coordinate, delegate to, and oversee other agents rather than perform tasks directly. The supervisor receives high-level goals, decomposes them into subtasks, assigns subtasks to appropriate worker agents, monitors progress, handles failures, and synthesizes results. This creates a hierarchical agent architecture.
What this is NOT
- Not a workflow engine (supervisor uses reasoning to decide delegation)
- Not just a router (supervisors also monitor progress and handle failures)
- Not the same as an orchestration framework (supervisor is an agent, not infrastructure)
Alternative Interpretations
Different communities use this term differently:
llm-practitioners
An LLM-based agent that routes tasks to specialist agents, decides when subtasks are complete, and aggregates results. Often implemented as the top-level node in a multi-agent graph.
Sources: LangGraph supervisor pattern, AutoGen orchestration documentation, CrewAI manager agent
multi-agent-systems
An agent in a hierarchical MAS that has authority over subordinate agents, assigning tasks and resolving conflicts between them.
Sources: Hierarchical multi-agent systems literature
Examples
- A manager agent that assigns research, writing, and editing to specialist agents
- CrewAI crew with a manager that oversees researcher, writer, and reviewer
- LangGraph supervisor that routes between code_agent, search_agent, and math_agent
- A project lead agent that breaks features into tasks and assigns to coding agents
Counterexamples
Things that might seem like Supervisor Agent but are not:
- A single agent that does everything itself
- A load balancer that randomly distributes work (no reasoning)
- A workflow that hardcodes which step goes to which service
Relations
- specializes agent (A supervisor is a type of agent)
- overlapsWith agent-orchestration (Supervisors are one orchestration pattern)
- overlapsWith multi-agent-system (Supervisors coordinate agents in MAS)
- requires agent (Supervisors delegate to other agents)
Implementations
Tools and frameworks that implement this concept:
- CrewAI primary