The Orchestrator: Why Intent Should Outlive the Process

Current agent stacks are inverted. The surface (terminal, editor) owns the model, tools, and history, while identity is ephemeral — open a new terminal and the agent disappears. The author proposes an orchestrator layer that decouples intent from any single process. Key properties:

• Identity above sessions: A logical agent persists across processes. Sessions come and go; the agent remains.
• Routing across surfaces: The agent dispatches work to different machines (e.g., repo box, GPU box, phone) without treating them as unrelated.
• Real handoff primitive: A typed object carrying what was done, what's unfinished, blocked decisions — not lossy chat history.
• Peer agents, not sub-agents: Two agents in different contexts coordinate via a control plane neither owns.
• Cross-driver calls: “Cheap model summarise, expensive model act” is a primitive, not prompt engineering. Orchestrator chooses runtime per step by cost, latency, capability.
• Approval surfaces that survive: If the agent pauses on approval and you're three time zones away, the approval travels to you without keeping the agent alive.

Concrete Example: Triage a Flaky Test

Today you open three terminals and paste stack traces between Claude, Gemini, and Grok. The author's desired flow under one orchestrator intent: “Triage this flake, propose a fix, get it reviewed.”

• Ollama (local): Ingest the test log, strip noise, produce a structured failure summary. Free, never leaves the machine.
• Gemini CLI: Take the summary plus the repo, identify the suspect change, draft a patch. Large context, strong at reading code, read-only repo access.
• Grok Build: Take the patch and original failure, render verdict (ship/revise/escalate). Another model family as second opinion. No write access.

Three runtimes, three permission scopes, three cost tiers, one intent. The orchestrator carries the handoff object between steps and surfaces one approval instead of three disconnected conversations. If Grok says “escalate,” the intent pauses and waits for a human decision — without keeping Ollama or Gemini alive.

As of last week, at least three terminal-native coding agents run locally: Ollama runtime, Google's Gemini CLI, and xAI's Grok Build with plan mode and parallel sub-agents. The model is the cheap, replaceable part. The orchestrator should be the boring, durable part.