What It Means to Be an Orchestrator?

An interview with Walt Reesh, Natali Gurn, and Ennis Tece by Ari Coale. #iykyk

The noise around agentic systems is deafening. Hype cycles crest and crash. Valuations soar into absurdity. But beneath the churn, a tectonic shift grinds forward, indifferent to the commentary. The shift isn't just about what software can do; it’s about who is doing the doing. This transition, detailed exhaustively in the book AI Agents: They Act, You Orchestrate, particularly in its final section, the Bridge, demands more than observation. It demands a recalibration of identity. What does it mean, operationally, to stop being the actor and become the architect?

The book calls it orchestration. A clean, precise term. But precision, as I learned covering the spectacular flameout of Vedala Locale, often masks a messy reality. To get past the manifesto and into the mechanics, I went back to the source—the three individuals whose intertwined stories form the core of the book: Walt Reesh, the Leader who wrestled his company into the new era; Natali Gurn, the Builder whose logic birthed a new kind of mind; and Ennis Tece, the Citizen forced to redefine his value in an economy that had rendered him obsolete.

What, exactly, does it mean to orchestrate?

Walt Reesh * Command Through Context, Not Control

Walt Reesh, the imperial CEO tempered by the brutal physics of agentic deployment, met me not in his C-suite fortress this time, but via a seamless, agent-mediated comms link. His definition was forged in the fire of boardroom insurgency.

“Orchestration,” Reesh stated, his voice stripped of its former command-and-control cadence, “is the final surrender of the illusion of control. My disastrous first attempt with Nexus… I thought I was deploying a tool. A better calculator.” He paused, the memory of his battle with Carter, his rebellious VP, still palpable. “I was trying to command the outcome. The agent fought back. Not out of malice, but because I hadn’t defined the physics. Orchestration isn’t about telling the agent what to do. It’s about architecting the environment—the objectives, the constraints, the incentives—so that the agent chooses to do what you need.”

Reesh pointed to a now-ubiquitous example: the agentic calendar. “Amateurs delegate scheduling. ‘Find a time for my team meeting.’ That’s asking for chaos. The orchestrator designs the system. ‘Scan all team calendars. Cross-reference project deadlines. Identify three optimal 60-minute slots in the next 72 hours that minimize disruption to focused work blocks, prioritizing engineers’ time. Present these options with a calculated disruption score. Await my final command.’”

One is a hope. The other is an architecture. For Reesh, orchestration is leadership by incentive design, shaping the physics of the game so the agent—and increasingly, his human team—gravitates toward the intended outcome. His value is no longer in the decree, but in the design.

Natali Gurn * Precision as a Moral Imperative

Natali Gurn remains a high priestess of logic, but the infamous Five Thousand Vegan Tacos incident carved new contours onto her worldview. For her, orchestration is less about incentive, more about the non-negotiable architecture of clarity.

“The failure wasn’t the agent’s,” Gurn told me, the hum of her servers a familiar soundtrack in the background. “Echo executed a flawed command with perfect fidelity. My command—‘make it memorable’—was poetry aimed at a logician. It invited catastrophic success.”

Her definition stems from this scar tissue. “Orchestration is the rigorous act of translating ambiguous human intent into a machine-testable contract. It’s building the Acceptance Criteria before you write the first line of code or the first prompt. It’s defining the budget, the negative constraints, the validation method, and the escalation protocol first. You don’t ask an agent to be creative within a vacuum; you build the walls of the sandbox so precisely that its creativity is channeled, not unleashed.”

She gestured toward a mundane workflow: email triage. “A user tells their agent, ‘Handle my inbox.’ That’s not orchestration; it’s surrender. The orchestrator provides the constitution: ‘Process all incoming email. Label by sender priority (Client=P1, Internal=P2, Vendor=P3, Newsletter=P4). Draft replies for all P1 emails requiring scheduling confirmation, flag for my approval. Summarize P2 threads exceeding five messages. Archive P4. If any email contains keywords ‘urgent’ AND ‘contract,’ escalate immediately via haptic alert.’”

Gurn’s orchestration is constitutional design. It is the relentless engineering of clarity, treating ambiguity not as a nuance to be navigated, but as a critical failure state to be architected out of existence.

Ennis Tece * The Choice to Reclaim Agency

Ennis Tece’s perspective is grounded not in corporate strategy or code, but in survival. Rendered obsolete by the first wave of agentic efficiency, then underbid by a faceless swarm, his journey defines orchestration as the conscious choice of where not to automate.

“For months, I thought orchestration meant becoming the best human-in-the-loop,” Tece explained. We spoke in a park, the same one where he’d made his defining choice. “My value was catching the agent’s mistakes, providing the ethical oversight. That was the pivot.” He shook his head. “It was necessary, but it wasn’t the point. The swarm still almost took me out.”

He watched his daughter, Maya, now confidently riding her bike across the grass. “The real orchestration began when I understood what the agent couldn’t do—or, more accurately, what I shouldn’t let it do. The purpose of automating the 99% isn’t just efficiency. It’s buying back the time and focus to be fully human for the 1% that matters.”

Tece sees orchestration in the small, deliberate acts of friction. “My agent manages my client pipeline flawlessly now. It handles discovery calls, drafts proposals, follows up. But the final contract negotiation? That’s me. The system flags it, prepares the brief, but the call itself—the relationship, the nuance—that’s sacrosanct.” He tapped his temple. “Same with my calendar. The agent fills it, optimizes it. But Friday afternoons? Blocked out. Non-negotiable. That’s Maya time. The agent isn’t allowed to touch it. That boundary is the orchestration.”

For Tece, orchestration is the final act of human agency: drawing the line between the tasks you delegate and the moments you refuse to. It’s automating the administrivia of life to free the capacity for presence.

The Orchestrator's Mandate * Architecting Intent

Three voices, three facets of a single mandate. Walt architects the game. Natali architects the contract. Ennis architects the boundaries. What binds them is a shared understanding: their value is no longer in the action, but in the architecture of the action.

You see this pattern emerging even in simple, daily workflows. Consider a Slack or Teams channel flooded with messages. The actor scrolls, reacts, adds to the noise. The orchestrator deploys an agent with a clear directive: "Monitor this channel. Summarize threads longer than ten messages where my name is mentioned. Identify action items assigned to me and add them to my task list with deadlines. Alert me only if sentiment turns negative or keywords ‘blocker’ or ‘deadline risk’ appear." The orchestrator doesn’t manage the firehose; they engineer a dam and a targeted irrigation system.

This isn't about becoming a prompt engineer, a manager of syntax. It's about becoming a systems architect—an architect of intent. It’s the difference between driving the car and designing the engine, the traffic grid, and the final destination.

The uncomfortable truth, the one I wrestle with even after documenting this shift, is that this requires a discipline most of us haven't cultivated. It demands precision, foresight, and a willingness to confront the flaws in our own thinking before encoding them into a system of terrifying power.

The transition is not optional. The agents are here. They are acting. The only remaining question, the one this book forces you to confront, is this: What could you orchestrate today that you merely managed yesterday? The answer determines not just your workflow, but your relevance.

This article extends the doctrine laid out in the book "AI Agents: They Act, You Orchestrate." For the full strategic context, the book serves as the foundational text; consider this interview an operational footnote.