## Definition The **orchestrator role** is what a software engineer does in an agentic workflow: set goals, accept risk, judge cross-context trade-offs, and grant final approval. The agents do the throughput; the human takes the accountability. ## Five Things Only Humans Do Well (today) 1. **Goal setting.** Translating "reduce churn" into "ship passwordless login by Q3" is judgement, not generation. 2. **Risk acceptance.** "We're going to ship this with a known limitation because the alternative is missing the launch." That sentence has a *name* on it. 3. **Cross-context judgement.** "Marketing is mid-campaign, so even though this is the right refactor, we delay." 4. **Adversarial reasoning under ambiguity.** When spec, data, and stakeholder disagree, deciding which to believe is a human call. 5. **Final approval.** Pressing merge. Hitting deploy. Saying "ship it." ## The Tony Stark / Jarvis Model - **Jarvis** (agents) handles the throughput — reading, writing, testing, reviewing, suggesting. Any hour, in parallel, without fatigue. - **Tony** (you) handles the direction — goal, trade-offs, approval, the call when something doesn't smell right. Not a hierarchy of intelligence; a partition of *accountability*. Jarvis cannot accept risk on Tony's behalf. ## Weekly Shape (orchestrator-mode IC) | Activity | Share | Notes | | --------------------------------------- | ----- | ---------------------------------------------- | | Specs and acceptance criteria | ~25% | Most leveraged thing you do. | | Reviewing agent output (including reviewer agents) | ~30% | | | Tuning the system (agents, hooks, memory) | ~10% | Less than expected; mostly Mondays. | | Strategic / cross-team | ~20% | More than expected. | | Direct hands-on coding | ~15% | The hard, novel, or critical bits. | ## Who Is Most at Risk Not the engineers who can't code; the engineers whose job *was* code review only. Agents read diffs more carefully than humans do. The escape is moving *up the stack* — specs, architecture, accountability — not out of it. ## Related - [[DORA Metrics]] - [[Decommission Discipline]] - [[Specialized Agent]]