Delegation is not orchestration — durable, externally-steerable child runs are the architectural leap

It’s easy to mistake working delegation for orchestration. Hermes delegates well — a child run gets its own task ID and terminal context, returns a structured summary, and is capped against runaway recursion — but lifecycle ownership stays with the parent: when the parent finishes, the child is gone. Real orchestration is a different tier: durable child runs with their own IDs, explicit lifecycle management, external steering, and cleanup that survives parent completion. This is the gap between An orchestrator agent that manages other agents solves the parallel coordination problem without human bottleneck as an aspiration and a mere delegation primitive, and it’s why Parallel agents create a management problem, not a coding problem — once children outlive parents you need a control plane, not just One session per contract beats long-running agent sessions or the Treat AI like a distributed team, not a single assistant metaphor.