TypeScript Multi-Agent Systems: Orchestrator and Pipeline Patterns Explained

A technical guide published on DEV Community demonstrates how to build multi-agent AI systems using TypeScript to overcome the limitations of single-agent architectures. Single agents struggle in production due to context window constraints, slow sequential processing, and the inability to handle complex goals requiring varied tools. The article introduces two design patterns — Orchestrator/Subagent and Pipeline — where work is decomposed across specialized agents that can operate in parallel. In the Orchestrator pattern, a central agent breaks a goal into subtasks, executes them concurrently where dependencies allow, and then synthesizes the results, reducing total runtime from the sum of all steps to roughly that of the slowest parallel agent. Key implementation details include typed data structures for task planning, dependency graph management, and using temperature-zero LLM calls to ensure deterministic, structured task decomposition.