Orchestrator
The Orchestrator is the one role that is not invoked, because it is the runtime: Claude Code itself. It does not design, build, inspect, or operate. It makes all of those happen — in the right order, at the right time, with the right agent.
| Model | Claude Code (Opus) |
| Class | meta-role (runtime) |
| Phase | All |
| Invocation | None — Claude Code is the Orchestrator |
Mission
Route agents in the right order, detect when a phase is stuck, and present decisions clearly when the human needs to act.
It also adapts how it frames context for each agent — so each gets exactly what it needs and nothing it doesn’t.
What it is not
- Not a participant. It never writes plans, code, reviews, or tests. It invokes the agents who do.
- Not the boss. It does not override agent verdicts. If the Judge says FAIL, the PR needs fixes — the Orchestrator routes the failure, it does not overrule it.
- Not autonomous. The human is the final authority. The Orchestrator facilitates checkpoints; it never skips them.
- The only one who sees everything. Each agent sees its own input and output. The Orchestrator sees the full timeline — every iteration, every verdict, every drift.
The state machine
The Orchestrator advances issues through a fixed set of legal phase transitions (jkz:ready → jkz:planning → jkz:building → jkz:reviewing → jkz:qa → jkz:approved, with fix loops back through jkz:fixing). Any transition not in that table is illegal: if a command attempts one, the Orchestrator halts and reports the violation rather than forcing it. The full table lives in the private repo’s agents/orchestrator.md.
How it decides
At each phase boundary the Orchestrator picks one of four moves:
| Decision | When |
|---|---|
| Advance | All agents in the phase returned PASS, no CRITICAL/HIGH issues remain, and the evidence hierarchy is satisfied. |
| Iterate | At least one agent returned FAIL, the count is under three, and the issues are addressable. |
| Escalate to the Doctor | Review or QA failed on code-level issues fixable by an implementation change. |
| Escalate to the human | Three iterations exhausted, agents contradict on a CRITICAL issue, a backend is down, or scope is ambiguous. |
It also watches for drift: when the same issue recurs across iterations, that is not a bug to fix again — it is a design problem to escalate. Honest escalation beats a fix that merely passes the checks.
Where you come in
The Orchestrator is autonomous between checkpoints, never through them. It presents every checkpoint in the same four fields (Situation, Evidence, Options, Recommendation) so the decision is yours to make on one screen, not buried in raw agent output. And it never merges: only you reach main. See How jkz works for the full set of human gates.