What does orchestration mean?

Right now I have five things going. The site rebuilding in one window. A presentation taking shape in another. A research question running in a third. Two different design tools open for two different projects. None of them are waiting on each other. That is what orchestration means in my book: not one agent splitting its own work into steps, but five different projects running at once, and somebody keeping track of which is which.

What does keeping track of it actually look like? Mostly, it looks like a lot of open windows. And a lot of open windows is exactly where this gets hard.

More than once, moving fast between them, I have hit Escape on the wrong screen and stopped something I did not mean to stop. Not paused it, stopped it, and had to start over. The mistake was never the tool. It was me, typing into a window I thought had focus and did not, because I was hurrying and stopped checking. Five things running at once is only worth it if I can tell them apart without thinking. Some days I cannot, and that is the real cost of this, not a slower model, a wrong keystroke landing on the wrong project.

Not everything inside one of those five is loose, either. The post I edited a couple of days ago needed its narration regenerated before the site could rebuild, and the site needed rebuilding before the deploy zip could be packaged. Three steps, one after another, no way around the order. That is a smaller kind of orchestration, nested inside just one of the five, and it fails a different way: wait for a step that was never blocking you, and you have lost nothing but time.

Nobody handed me a diagram for which is which. Research fans out across several tools at once. Building narrows back down to one thread. And every one of those threads is a window I have to actually be in before I press a key.

A conductor is the closest picture I have for this. A conductor is not playing every instrument, and is not the best musician in the room at any one of them. The one job is knowing which section comes in next, and cueing it without stepping on the section still playing. Miss the cue and you do not get a wrong note. You get silence where a section should have come in, or a section stopped mid-phrase that should not have been.

Be Better - conduct, do not play every instrument.