55/60 Days System Design Questions

You built an agent. It works.

Now you need 5 of them running in parallel, sharing state, and handing off work to each other.

Your pipeline breaks on the first real workload.

Here's the setup:
You're building a research agent system. A user asks a complex question. You need to:

• Fan out to 3 specialized sub-agents simultaneously
• One agent might spawn 2 more based on what it finds
• They all write back to shared context
• A final agent synthesizes everything

Classic multi-agent orchestration. You have 4 options for how agents coordinate.

A) Centralized Orchestrator — one controller agent dispatches tasks, collects results, manages shared state. Agents are dumb workers.

B) Decentralized Peer Handoff — each agent decides who gets the task next. No central controller. Agents communicate directly.

C) Shared Message Queue + Blackboard — all agents read/write to a shared blackboard. Coordination happens through state, not calls.

D) Hierarchical Nesting — orchestrator spawns sub-orchestrators. Each sub-tree is self-coordinating. Recursive decomposition of the problem.

Pick one — A, B, C, or D — and tell me why. Full breakdown in the comments.

Drop your answer 👇