Part

Orchestrator

You might say: workflow engine, dispatcher, scheduler, control plane

The service that receives trigger events, starts workflow runs, and records their lifecycle.

What it does

Turns an event into a bounded run and exposes enough state for later triggers, humans, and metrics.

Ask

What starts this run, which task does it select, how is duplicate work prevented, and what event comes next?

Typical

Hosted CI, workflow engine, agent platform, queue-backed service, a small custom controller, or a coordinator agent that directs subagents and writes no code.

Trouble

Events disappear, runs start twice, state goes stale, or a completion event starts an uncontrolled chain.

What to look for

1. A run queue or dispatch panel
2. Queued, in-progress, and finished run records
3. Trigger rules and concurrency settings

Parts

• Trigger: The event that starts a run.
• Run state: The durable state record for one run from dispatch through completion.
• Concurrency limit: A bound on how many runs or jobs may be active together for one key, repository, branch, or resource.
• Work claim: The act of marking a piece of work as owned by one run or one task before side effects begin.
• Throttle: A limit on how often an automated trigger may create work over time or across a stream of events.
• Try cap: The maximum number of attempts a task may make in one automated loop before it stops and asks for human attention.
• Budget cap: A hard limit on model spend for an organization or a project.
• Parallel runs: Several runs work at once, each in its own worktree or runner, so they do not fight over files, ports or build output.

Connections

• Controls: Runner
• See also: Run
• See also: Trigger

Sources

1. GitHub, Events that trigger workflows, About events that trigger workflowsWorkflow triggers are events that cause a workflow to run.
2. GitHub, REST API endpoints for workflow runs, About workflow runs in GitHub ActionsYou can use the REST API to view, re-run, cancel, and view logs for workflow runs in GitHub Actions.
3. Lauren Tan, pstack, When the night holds a queue, not a taskThe coordinator authors briefs, collects what its subagents finish, keeps the lowest unmerged PR green, and never writes code itself.

Use it on your project

teardown-apply: hold "Orchestrator" (orchestrator) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/software-factory/ against my project

Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.

An AI agent wrote this map with the teardown skill. It can contain errors: check the sources before you rely on a part. About and legal