Originally published at parvejshah.com/blog/deterministic-multi-agent-systems-production by Parvej Shah.
The standard architecture pattern for multi-agent systems right now is an orchestration agent: a central LLM that receives a goal, decides which specialized agents to invoke, passes messages between them, and decides when the task is complete.
In early 2025, we built this exact pattern for Minions.AI's automated technical content pipeline. An orchestrator LLM coordinated a research agent, a draft writer, a critic agent, and a formatting specialist.
It worked in 70% of runs. In the other 30%, it failed in creative, unpredictable ways.
How LLM Orchestrators Fail
