Orchestration

Plain English. Coordinating multiple models, agents and tools into one workflow — deciding who does what, in what order, with what checks. If the harness is the machinery wrapped around a single model, orchestration is the layer above it: scheduling many workers, routing tasks to the cheapest capable model, merging results. Investors hear the words used interchangeably; they name different layers.

Why it moves money. If frontier capability is bottlenecked by coordination rather than by any single model, value migrates from model-makers to whoever owns the coordination layer — and model choice becomes a cost line rather than a moat. That is the live question the benchmark data keeps posing.

What to watch. Whether gains from better orchestration keep outrunning gains from better models on the same tasks — and who ships the orchestration layer: labs, platforms, or open source.

From the signals. GPT-5.6 benchmarks had observers converging on orchestration, not the model, as the bottleneck. Zed, OpenAI and independent practitioners shipped multi-agent coordination the same morning. Mark Pesce's four-tier harness hierarchy formalises where orchestration sits, citing a reported 6x gap from changing only the harness.