The Conductor Pattern
How a lead agent routes questions to domain-expert subsets instead of running all agents on every query.
The Problem
If you have 11 TCM master agents and a patient asks about spring allergies, you don't want all 11 debating. You want the ones whose expertise matches the condition (warm disease school, wei-qi theory, spring pathogens). The rest are noise and cost.
The Pattern
A Conductor agent holds a routing table:
症状类别 → 推荐专家子集
------------------------------------------------
春季过敏 → 叶天士 + 张仲景 + 李东垣 + 孙思邈
妇科病 → 傅青主 + 朱丹溪 + 李时珍
温热病 → 叶天士 + 吴鞠通 + 薛雪
The conductor matches the incoming question, picks 3-5 relevant experts, hosts a structured debate, aggregates positions, produces a unified answer.
Examples
- ●tcm_conductor — routes medical questions across 11 historical physicians
- ●quant_conductor — routes financial questions through 5-phase pipeline (fundamentals → bull/bear → trader → risk → publish)
- ●spiritual_conductor — routes contemplative questions across 10 mystics (Guyon, Lawrence, John of Cross, Teresa, Molinos, etc.)
- ●growth_conductor — routes GTM strategy across 6 marketing specialists
Why It Works
Expertise concentration: 4 experts debating deeply beats 11 experts each saying a line.
Token efficiency: ~40% of agent pool invoked per query, not 100%.
Real disagreement: experts with different schools produce genuine tension (warm-disease vs cold-school, evangelical vs contemplative).
Structured output: conductor synthesizes to a final position with attributed voices, not mashed consensus.
Related
- ●The 74-Agent Swarm — conductor roles in the swarm
- ●Thin Soul, Fat Skill — conductors are souls with routing logic