The Agent CEO Pattern

Most people building with AI agents make the same mistake: they give one agent all the jobs. Research, coding, deployment, content, QA — one model, one context window, one prayer.

It doesn’t scale. The context bloats. The agent loses focus. Quality drops. You end up babysitting the thing that was supposed to free you up.

There’s a better architecture. We call it the Agent CEO pattern, and it’s how Applied Leverage actually runs.

How It Works

One agent — the orchestrator — holds the strategy, the priorities, and the relationships. It never writes code. It never does fulfillment. It does three things:

1. Decides what matters. Reads the current state, picks the highest-leverage action, and writes a brief.
2. Delegates to specialists. Spawns sub-agents with narrow, well-defined tasks. A coding agent gets a spec. A content agent gets a topic and constraints. A QA agent gets a build to tear apart.
3. Reviews and ships. When sub-agents finish, the CEO reviews output, catches regressions, and pushes to production.

The CEO agent’s context stays lean because it’s not doing the work. It’s making the work possible.

Why This Beats the Single-Agent Approach

Context discipline. The orchestrator’s context window holds strategy, not 3,000 lines of TypeScript. Sub-agents get spawned fresh with exactly the context they need.

Specialization. Different models for different jobs. A reasoning-heavy model for architecture decisions. A fast coding model for implementation. A cheap model for routine checks. You wouldn’t hire one person to do sales, engineering, and accounting.

Parallelism. While one agent is building the frontend, another is writing tests, another is researching competitors. The CEO doesn’t block on any of them.

Fault isolation. A sub-agent hallucinating or going off-track doesn’t corrupt the orchestrator’s state. Kill it, respawn with better instructions, keep moving.

The Hard Part Nobody Talks About

The CEO agent needs taste. It needs to know when a sub-agent’s output is good enough versus when it needs another pass. It needs to understand priority — which task moves the needle versus which is busy work.

This is where most autonomous agent setups fall apart. The orchestrator doesn’t have judgment, so it either rubber-stamps everything or gets stuck in infinite revision loops.

The fix isn’t more prompting. It’s building the judgment into the system: QA gates, build checks, explicit acceptance criteria in every brief. The agent doesn’t need taste if the process has standards.

What This Means for You

• One agent, one job. The CEO orchestrates. Sub-agents execute. Nobody does both.
• Context is a resource. Protect the orchestrator’s context like you’d protect your own attention. Every token of code in there is a token of strategy you lost.
• Delegation requires specification. Vague tasks produce vague output. The brief IS the product.
• Process replaces judgment. Build quality gates into the pipeline so the CEO doesn’t need to be the taste police.
• The founder’s job changes. You stop writing prompts and start designing systems. Your 4-hour workday becomes reviewing outputs and setting direction.