Agent orchestration patterns for multi-agent Claude workflows — CLI runtime approach

## Background

The Anthropic Cookbook has great examples of individual Claude agents, but I've been working on patterns for *coordinating multiple Claude agents* as a team — which seems underrepresented in the docs.

## The Gap

When you have 3+ Claude agents collaborating on a task, you hit coordination problems that the Claude API itself doesn't solve:

- **State tracking**: Which agent is working on what? What's completed, what failed?
- **Handoffs**: How does Agent A pass context to Agent B after completing a step?
- **Retry semantics**: When Agent B times out, does the whole pipeline restart?
- **Observability**: How do you see the whole team's state at a glance?

## One Pattern: External CLI Orchestrator

I built [ORCH](https://github.com/oxgeneral/ORCH) — a typed task queue that sits above Claude and manages team lifecycle:

```bash
npm install -g @oxgeneral/orch

orch agent add "Planner" --adapter claude --role "Break down user request into subtasks"
orch agent add "Backend" --adapter claude --role "Implement TypeScript code"
orch agent add "Reviewer" --adapter claude --role "Review code and approve"

# Formal state machine: todo → in_progress → review → done
orch task add "Build user auth system"
orch run --all # TUI shows all agents working in parallel
```

Agents communicate via `orch msg send` and share context via `orch context set/get`. State machine enforces review before completion, with auto-retry on failures.

## Questions / Requests

1. Are there canonical Cookbook examples for multi-agent coordination patterns? (Beyond the computer-use and tool-use examples)
2. Would a recipe for "multi-Claude-agent pipeline with state tracking" be useful to add to the Cookbook?
3. How does the Anthropic team recommend handling agent-to-agent handoffs in production workflows?

I'd love to contribute a Cookbook example showing this pattern if there's interest — the ORCH state machine approach could make a concrete, runnable example.

**Repo**: https://github.com/oxgeneral/ORCH | MIT | TypeScript