Lead Researcher
A lead agent writes a research plan and fans out parallel sub-agents for breadth-first information gathering — then merges their findings into a synthesized answer.
Intent & Description
🎯 Intent
A lead agent writes a research plan and dispatches parallel sub-agents that fan out for breadth-first information gathering, then merges results.
📋 Context
Open-ended research tasks — market briefs, competitive intelligence, literature reviews — benefit from breadth-first exploration across many sources rather than depth-first reasoning along one thread. A deadline of hours, not days, makes serial search a bottleneck.
💡 Solution
Lead agent receives the user query, plans a set of parallel research questions, and dispatches each to a sub-agent. Each sub-agent searches independently and returns structured findings to the lead. The lead synthesizes the answer; if synthesis reveals gaps, it spawns additional targeted sub-agents.
Real-world Use Case
- Research-shaped tasks benefit from breadth-first parallel sub-agents across diverse sources.
- A lead can plan, dispatch, and synthesize findings rather than execute serially.
- Source diversity matters and a single agent’s serial search would be a bottleneck.
Source
📌 TL;DR
Lead writes the plan, sub-agents fan out in parallel, lead synthesizes — breadth-first research at the speed of parallelism.
Advantages
- Breadth-first parallelism cuts wall-clock time dramatically on research tasks.
- The lead’s scratchpad (research plan + gap analysis) makes the research process auditable.
Disadvantages
- Sub-agent overlap and redundancy — multiple agents may search the same sources.
- Synthesis becomes the new bottleneck when the lead must reconcile many contradictory findings.