Yes, it's a "cloud provider" but it's a cloud provider running an open model you can download (and that other cloud providers do host). I just happen to not have a computer big enough to host it.

As for the Orchestrator, it's pretty simple. In essence, it's like "Jira/Trello/Kanban on autopilot". Work items have states, a state machine defines how those work items transition between states, states are todo, in progress, retrying, reviewing, code reviewing, done. work items also have connections, allowing the LLMs to specify a dependency graph, and the dependency graph informs the dispatch order/parallelism, as well as when branches have to be merged. I talk to the steward, the steward has tool calls for interacting with all the data, and the orchestrator auto-dispatches all the work that comes in. I can generate work as fast as I can describe it to the steward, and that's usually the bottleneck.

So far I haven't had to deal with "how do you get the LLM to re-organize the work mid flight due to a worker finding something not accounted for by the planning", but I assume it'll come soon. The most complicated digraph I've tossed at it was 9 items and 4 layers deep. The kind of work I've given it hasn't been scoped large enough yet, so we'll see how it tackles that.