Every modern ADE already runs multi-agent orchestration internally. When a developer uses Claude Code, Cursor, or any comparable tool on a non-trivial task, the tool is already spawning subagents, making parallel tool calls, and running evaluator loops. The distinction that matters for practitioners is between implicit orchestration, where the tool manages decomposition internally, and explicit orchestration, where the developer designs the decomposition because the tool’s internal handling is not sufficient.

Decomposition is the engineering activity that determines whether explicit orchestration succeeds. The module teaches how to break a task into sub-tasks with clear boundaries, how to identify what can run in parallel versus what must run in sequence, and how to isolate context so that each agent works in a clean scope.

The five workflow patterns provide the vocabulary for explicit orchestration design: prompt chaining, routing, parallelization, orchestrator-workers, and evaluator-optimizer. N-version programming is a counterintuitive application of the parallelization pattern. The cost constraint frames every decision: multi-agent workflows use approximately 15 times more tokens than standard interactions.