# Supervisor Agent

> A coordinating agent that decomposes work, invokes specialists, and combines their outputs.

- Category: Agents & Autonomy
- Stage: Rising
- Also called: Manager agent, Orchestrator agent
- Canonical: https://www.joelcsaji.com/ai-dictionary/supervisor-agent

## Plain English

It is the project manager of a multi-agent setup.

## Example

A supervisor decides whether the legal, billing, or technical sub-agent should handle a customer question.

## Why it matters

Supervisor patterns make complex systems debuggable by keeping a clear owner for routing and synthesis.

## Related

- [Orchestrator-Workers](https://www.joelcsaji.com/ai-dictionary/orchestrator-workers)
- [Sub-Agent](https://www.joelcsaji.com/ai-dictionary/sub-agent)
- [Handoff](https://www.joelcsaji.com/ai-dictionary/handoff)

## Sources

- [Anthropic: Building Effective Agents](https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-agents)
- [LangChain: Multi-Agent](https://docs.langchain.com/oss/python/langchain/multi-agent)