What is meta-agent pattern?

Meta-agent pattern is a concept in personal epistemology: A meta-agent that coordinates other agents by deciding which should run when.

Example: You have a morning routine that includes journaling, email triage, and a planning session. On most days, you run them in the same order regardless of context. But some mornings you wake up with an urgent problem dominating your attention — and by the time you finish journaling and email, the planning session is rushed and shallow. You have no mechanism that looks at today's conditions and decides which agent should run first. Compare that to a morning where you pause for 30 seconds before starting anything, assess what is most cognitively demanding today, and reorder the sequence accordingly. That 30-second pause is an orchestrator agent. It does not journal, triage email, or plan. It decides which of those agents should activate, in what order, given the current state of the system.

This concept is part of Phase 26 (Multi-Agent Coordination) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for multi-agent coordination.