Lead Researcher

Problem

A single agent doing the research serially is bottlenecked on its own token generation: it can only search and read one source at a time, and by the time it has visited ten sources the deadline has passed or its context window is exhausted. A generic orchestrator-workers pattern handles parallel sub-tasks but does not say anything about how to plan research questions, how to keep sub-agents from overlapping, or how to synthesise findings into a coherent answer. The team needs a structure shaped specifically for research, not a generic dispatcher.

Solution

Lead agent receives the user query, plans a set of parallel research questions, and dispatches each to a sub-agent. Each sub-agent searches independently and returns structured findings to the lead. The lead reads the returned findings and synthesises the answer; if synthesis reveals gaps, the lead spawns additional sub-agents.

When to use

• Research-shaped tasks benefit from breadth-first parallel sub-agents.
• A lead can plan, dispatch, and synthesise findings rather than execute serially.
• Source diversity matters and a single agent's serial search would be a bottleneck.