Confidence: medium. Evidence: benchmark and case study. Last substantive change: 2026-07.
This subsystem owns how work is broken up and let into the factory: how a goal becomes runs, and what each run is required to declare before it starts.
The conclusion
Decomposition should be revised at runtime based on evidence, not fixed up front, and every admitted run needs a contract. That contract states a goal, scope, non-goals, budget, permissions, a stopping condition, the evidence it must produce, and an escalation path. Runtime branching beats static decomposition because fixed task graphs prove brittle the moment reality diverges from the plan.
How the thinking got here
Static task graphs and elaborate agent personas gave way to managed queues, runtime branching, and explicit run contracts. The empirical result that moved the field was that static decomposition can increase retry cost, while runtime branching, deciding the next step from what the last step actually produced, is the active lever.
Credible alternatives, and when each is right
| Approach | Right when |
|---|---|
| Single long-horizon agent | small, coherent tasks |
| Planner and executor split | plan and execution benefit from different context |
| Static DAG | stable, well-understood pipelines |
| Dynamic branching | outcomes are uncertain and evidence should steer |
| Market or auction allocation | many independent units of work |
| Human dispatcher | high-stakes prioritization |
Where it fails and what we still don't know
Failures cluster around coordination: priority inversion, starvation, duplicate work, runaway loops, and work admitted without a stopping condition. Evidence is moderate to strong for dynamic task management and weak for claims that elaborate role-playing organizations outperform simpler loops. Open questions include admission control, work-in-progress limits, cancellation, and optimal decomposition by task topology.
What would change our mind
Controlled evidence that a fixed organizational structure reliably beats runtime branching on real, varied work would reopen the static-versus-dynamic question.