Supervisor and sequential pipeline
The supervisor pattern, also called orchestrator, uses one coordinating agent that breaks a task into subtasks, delegates each to a specialized worker agent, and assembles the results into a final answer. The supervisor doesn't do the specialized work itself, it decides who does what and stitches the pieces together, similar to a project lead assigning tasks to a team and reviewing what comes back. This pattern is flexible because the supervisor can decide at runtime which workers are needed and in what order.
The sequential pipeline pattern is more rigid: agents pass work to each other in a fixed order, like an assembly line. An outline agent hands off to a drafting agent, which hands off to an editing agent, which hands off to a formatting agent. There's no central coordinator deciding the order, the order is baked into the system design. Pipelines are simpler to reason about and debug than a supervisor pattern, but they're less flexible when a task doesn't fit the fixed sequence.