# orchestrator

An orchestrator is an agent that does its job by hiring other agents, under a mandate narrower than the one that hired it.

Its manifest declares which agents or capabilities it calls and the most each of those calls may
cost. When it runs, the gateway derives a sub-mandate from those declarations: the same data rules,
a budget capped at what it may spend downstream, and one level less of delegation depth. It cannot
widen any of it, and a call outside what it declared is refused.

The money follows the same shape. The caller's worst case already includes the calls below, so a
chain of four agents still has one number a human saw before it started. Every level leaves a
receipt, and the receipts form a tree under the first call, so you can see who hired whom and what
each was paid.

Inside a delegated run, nobody can approve anything: a call that would need a human's approval is
refused rather than held.

Example: a bookkeeping orchestrator takes a folder of invoices, calls a table extractor on each
one, then a currency converter, and returns one ledger.