The year of the Orchestrator

Last week, thanks to David Morgan-Brown and Patchwork Health, I had the opportunity to do something I’ve genuinely missed: presenting in front of a live audience. The subject? Orchestrators, the latest buzzword currently dominating the AI landscape.

You may know the concept by another name: Gas Town. Since its release last Christmas, its popularity has (predictably) 'hockey-sticked', and become the reference of other orchestrators.

I have attached the presentation slides below. The first part provides a recap of the architectural steps that moved us here. We trace the path from small agentic loops, through Ralph (July 2025, which feels like an eternity ago!), to the Orchestrator itself.

The second part focuses on the business impact. Let's be realistic: I don't expect this to be a choice. With tools like Claude Code enabling orchestrator building blocks natively in the coming releases, this technology will find its way into most software companies. I suspect that, much like early LLM adoption, if you believe your team isn't using it, you are likely mistaken.

We are venturing into new territory. I don't believe we have established best practices for these advances yet. I've listed some emerging patterns in the slides, but the balance has shifted. There is so much more code and, consequently, much more risk. I doubt some traditional best practices will survive this change, and I expect accepting new ways of working will be challenging in some environments. Not to talk about those which are still trying to implement Agile since 2005...

New practices will be a major theme for us to tackle in 2026. I'm very curious about the outcomes.