Overview
A serial workflow asks one agent to complete step one, then step two, then step three, then step four. If each step takes five minutes, the total is twenty minutes. When steps two, three, and four are independent, they can run at the same time. A workflow might then require five minutes for the initial step, five minutes for the parallel block, and two minutes for integration, reducing total elapsed time to twelve minutes.
Fan-out begins with decomposition. The orchestrator determines which parts can be completed without waiting for one another. In a research task, separate agents might investigate different platforms, sources, technical options, or evaluation dimensions. In a software task, separate agents might inspect architecture, accessibility, performance, testing, or usability.
Fan-in begins when the worker outputs are complete. A synthesizer receives the condensed findings rather than repeating the underlying research. Its task is to identify agreement, preserve meaningful differences, reconcile conflicts where possible, and produce one coherent answer, plan, or set of changes.
This arrangement separates two kinds of work:
- Broad collection or inspection, which can be distributed across several faster or lower-cost
agents.
- Integration and judgment, which can be assigned to a stronger agent with a focused prompt.
Parallelization also controls context growth. In a serial research flow, one conversation accumulates every page, observation, and intermediate conclusion. Later reasoning occurs inside a larger and noisier context. In a parallel flow, each worker handles a smaller slice in a fresh context, and the synthesizer receives only the useful outputs.