What Is Agent Orchestration, and How Is It Different from Agent Management?
Agent orchestration is the real-time coordination of a task: deciding which agent acts next, what context it inherits, and when a human approves a step. Agent management is the ongoing governance of the agents themselves — provisioning, permissions, versioning, and monitoring — independent of any single task. Orchestration answers "what happens next on this work item"; management answers "is this agent still configured, permitted, and worth running."
What orchestration actually handles
Orchestration is scoped to a piece of work moving through a pipeline: a triage agent decides a bug is simple enough to fix, hands it to an implementation agent, which hands its output to a review agent. Every decision is about sequencing and handoffs for that task, in something close to real time.
What management actually handles
Management is scoped to the agents as standing assets, not to any one task: what repos and credentials a given agent configuration can touch, which skills and MCPs it's allowed to load, what model or harness it runs, and whether its output over the last month justifies its cost. None of that is decided per-task — it's decided once, applied every time the agent runs, and revisited on a schedule.
Orchestration vs. management
| Agent orchestration | Agent management | |
|---|---|---|
| Question it answers | What should happen next on this work item? | Is this agent configured, permitted, and worth running? |
| Time horizon | Per task, in real time | Ongoing, across all tasks |
| Typical decisions | Routing, handoffs, sequencing, escalation | Provisioning, permissions, versioning, retirement |
| Where it lives | The workflow/pipeline definition | Platform and governance policy |
| Failure mode if missing | Agents run in isolation, no handoffs | Agents accumulate access and drift unmonitored |
Why teams conflate the two
Both get described loosely as "controlling agents," but a team can have one without the other. Good orchestration with no management looks like clean handoffs between agents that nobody has audited for access in months. Good management with no orchestration looks like a roster of well-governed agents that still require a human to manually kick off and sequence every run. Neither is a functioning system on its own.
How Warp fits
Warp Factories treats these as connected but distinct layers. The foreman/subagent pattern handles orchestration — routing a work item to triage, spec, implement, or review and passing context forward. Factory-as-code and the control room handle management — provisioning is version-controlled and auditable, and every agent run is scored on cost, quality, and throughput so a team can tell whether an agent configuration is still worth running, not just whether it handed off cleanly. Warp reports its own team automates 20–30% of its PRs through factories that run both layers together. For the full picture of how a governed loop works end to end, see Warp's guide to cloud software factories.
Start with one workflow
If you're missing orchestration, start by defining one explicit handoff — triage to implementation — instead of a human manually kicking off each agent. If you're missing management, start by writing down what one agent configuration is allowed to touch and reviewing its run history monthly. Most teams need both eventually; few need both on day one. Check out Warp Factories today at https://warp.dev
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