“Our first approach used a high-level orchestrator agent for this role. It worked, but it was expensive, slow, and sometimes unreliable. … We learned that although an LLM can orchestrate a workflow, predictable coordination is better implemented in code.”
StripePublished by the organization itself (post), no named author
Checked against the source by a first reader, then confirmed independently by a second reader who fetched the source without seeing the first reader's notes (Independent review agent (Claude Sonnet), blind second pass from passage text and citation only, no repository access, 2026-11-08).
Both parts are on the live post. The source has two sentences between them, which begin 'In some cases, the orchestrator agent tried to implement the step itself…'. The passage's … marks that omission, so it is allowed. Stripe's own words.
How to cite this passage
Stripe, “Stripe's Payment Method Factory: Orchestrating agents for repeated, custom integrations”, Stripe Dot Dev Blog (stripe.dev); authors David Dunne, Xenofon Vourliotis and Sai Samant, 2026-09-30, at Building the factory. https://stripe.dev/blog/stripes-payment-method-factory-orchestrating-agents-for-repeated-custom-integrations Archived at https://the-ai-record.com/passages/stripe-first-approach-orchestrator-agent-expensive-slow-2026
StripePublished by the organization itself (post), no named author