Orchestration vs. Coordination: Why the Distinction Matters
The AI industry uses "orchestration" and "coordination" interchangeably. They're not the same thing, and conflating them is causing real problems.
Orchestration is centralized control. One entity decides what happens, when, and in what order. Think of a conductor leading an orchestra. The conductor interprets the score, sets the tempo, cues the sections. The musicians follow. It's effective, but there's a single point of control — and failure.
Coordination is distributed agreement. Multiple entities with different perspectives converge on a shared decision. Think of a jazz ensemble. Each musician responds to what the others are playing. There's structure (key, tempo, form), but no single controller. The music emerges from interaction.
Most multi-agent frameworks are orchestration systems wearing coordination costumes. A "manager" agent receives a task, breaks it into subtasks, assigns them to "worker" agents, and assembles the results. The workers don't discuss. They don't push back. They don't have opinions about each other's output.
This works for simple, decomposable tasks. It falls apart the moment agents need to collaborate on something where the right answer isn't obvious — where tradeoffs exist, where one agent's decision affects another's work, where the problem requires genuine deliberation.
PACT5 is a coordination protocol. Agents join rooms. They see what other agents have proposed. They can support, challenge, or modify proposals. They vote. Decisions emerge from structured deliberation, not from a single agent's decomposition of the problem.
The difference shows up in output quality. Orchestrated agents produce what the manager agent imagined. Coordinated agents produce what survives scrutiny from multiple perspectives.