Task Delegation (Multi-Agent Systems)

When many agents collaborate, someone has to decide who does what. Task delegation is how a manager agent breaks a goal into subtasks and assigns each to the most suitable specialist. It's the "who does what" of a multi-agent system — and the manager-worker pattern is its backbone.

💡 In one line: Task delegation is a manager agent decomposing a goal and assigning each subtask to the best-suited agent.

What is Task Delegation?

A coordinator (manager) agent decomposes a goal into subtasks and assigns each to the right agent based on its capabilities. Rather than every agent trying to do everything, work is routed to the specialist best equipped for it.

The Manager-Worker (Supervisor) Pattern

A lead agent decomposes the task, routes subtasks to worker agents, then collects and integrates their results. It's a hierarchical structure — one coordinator, many specialists.

How Delegation Works

Choosing the Right Agent

The manager acts as a router, matching each subtask to an agent by capability and role (and sometimes load or cost). Good routing is what makes delegation efficient rather than random.

Handoffs

A handoff passes a task — along with its context — from one agent to another. This is a first-class concept in frameworks like OpenAI Swarm, LangGraph, and CrewAI, where an agent can explicitly hand control to a better-suited one.

Dynamic vs. Static Delegation

• Static — assignments are predefined. Predictable, but inflexible.
• Dynamic — the manager decides at runtime who handles what. Flexible, but harder to reason about.

Re-delegation & Failure

If a worker fails or returns poor results, the manager can reassign or retry. This ability to re-delegate is what keeps a delegated workflow robust.

Benefits

• Specialisation, parallelism, and scalability.
• Clear ownership — each subtask has a responsible agent.

Challenges

• Wrong assignment — the manager picks a poorly-suited agent.
• Context loss on handoff.
• Manager bottleneck and coordination cost.
• Accountability across many agents.

Delegation vs. Orchestration

• Delegation — assigning tasks to agents.
• Orchestration — coordinating the whole workflow (the next subtopic).

Delegation is one part of orchestration.

Best Practices

• Capability-aware routing, and pass enough context on handoffs.
• Handle failures with re-delegation.
• Write clear task specs, and don't overload the manager.

Summary

• Task delegation has a manager decompose a goal and assign subtasks.
• The manager-worker pattern routes work to specialists and integrates results.
• Handoffs pass tasks with context; delegation can be static or dynamic.
• Re-delegation on failure keeps it robust.
• Delegation is part of orchestration, coming next. EOF echo created