The Supervisor Pattern: Why God-Agents Always Collapse (and What to Build Instead)

Your $4M agent project just failed. Not because the LLM wasn't smart enough. Not because the prompts were wrong. Because you built a god-agent. One LLM handling routing, validation, tool calling, synthesis, formatting, and error recovery. Ten responsibilities. Zero supervision. Infinite loops guaranteed. God-agents don't scale. They collapse. I've watched three production systems die this way. Same pattern: works perfectly in (3 steps, happy path), breaks catastrophically in production (12 steps, edge cases, retries.