Cadre

Handoffs and Routines — Stateless Orchestration

OpenAI's Swarm (October 2024) distilled multi-agent orchestration to two primitives: **routines** (instructions + tools as a system prompt) and **handoffs** (a tool that returns another Agent). No state machine, no branching DSL — the LLM routes by calling the right handoff tool. The OpenAI Agents SDK (March 2025) is the production successor. Swarm itself remains the cleanest conceptual reference — its entire source fits in a few hundred lines. The pattern is viral because the API surface is roughly "agent = prompt + tools; handoff = function returning agent." Limitation: stateless, so memory is the caller's problem.

Learn + Build 1 hr Python (stdlib)

Prerequisites: Phase 16 · 04 (Primitive Model)

#Problem

Every multi-agent framework wants you to learn its DSL: LangGraph nodes and edges, CrewAI crews and tasks, AutoGen GroupChat and managers. The DSLs are real abstractions, but they make the thing feel heavier than it needs to be.

Swarm pushes in the opposite direction: use the tool-calling capability the model already has. Handoffs become tool calls. The orchestrator is whichever agent currently holds the conversation. The state machine is implicit in the agents' system prompts.

#Problem

Keep going. The rest of this lesson is one step away.