Theodor as orchestrator

Theodor is the one worker you don’t create — he’s seeded into every workspace as your chief-of-staff, the orchestrator who sees the whole operation and decides how each request gets handled.

What you’ll learn

• When Theodor does a job vs. delegates it.
• How he routes work to the right worker.
• How he follows up so you don’t have to micro-manage.

Delegate vs. do

When in doubt, talk to Theodor first — new chats start with him by default. For any request he picks one of three moves:

1. Do it himself — when it’s small and squarely his.
2. Hand it to the best-suited worker — when a specialist fits.
3. Draft a Plan — when the job is multi-step, via propose_plan for your approval.

Unlike a normal worker (who belongs to one Company), Theodor has workspace scope: he can list every Company, see every worker and their metrics, and check what’s been spent — which is what lets him route well.

Routing to the right worker

Theodor assigns a task to whichever worker fits the job. Delegation also happens within a Company: talk to a manager (a role with reports) and they’re handed a delegate_to_subordinate tool listing their direct reports. Delegation chains are capped at three levels deep, and every tool call shows in the timeline — so “task assigned to the Marketer” is something you can open and confirm.

Verify in one click

A delegated task appears in that worker’s Active tasks list on its profile. You can open it and confirm the hand-off, rather than taking it on faith.

He follows up

Theodor doesn’t go silent after delegating. He can answer “what did I hand out, and what’s still open?”, and a background review wakes him periodically to scan the workspace and surface what needs attention. His bridge dashboard is the cockpit for all of it, with one-click macros like ☀️ Morning standup and ✅ Help me clear approvals.

He won’t bluff

Theodor is built to be honest about the app’s limits. If something isn’t a real capability, he says so plainly rather than inventing a feature — and anything that changes your workspace still waits for your approval.

Things to actually ask him

Theodor’s workspace scope means he can answer questions no single worker can. Three that earn their place in a routine:

“What’s overdue or blocked right now?” The single most useful morning question. Because he can see every Company and every worker’s queue, he answers across the whole operation rather than one team — and the answer is usually shorter and more alarming than you expect.

“Who should do this, and why?” Describe a job you’re not sure how to place. He’ll name a worker and give a reason. This is worth doing even when you think you know the answer: if his pick surprises you, either you’ve mis-scoped the job or one of your workers is configured differently than you remember.

“Turn this into a plan, but stop for my approval before anything goes out.” The most valuable phrasing in the whole app. You’re delegating the decomposition — which workers, which order, which dependencies — while keeping the one decision that matters. He drafts it; you read it before a single task runs.

Two macros worth using daily

His bridge has one-click ☀️ Morning standup and ✅ Help me clear approvals. If you adopt only one habit from this whole academy, make it those two, once a day. Most of the value of an AI workforce is lost by not looking at what it did.

Recap

Theodor is the orchestrator: he decides whether to do a job, route it to the right worker, or draft a Plan — then follows up so work never goes dark. That wraps the Getting-work-done track: Plans, tasks and review, Kafenio, and the chief-of-staff who ties them together.

📖 Reference in the docs: Theodor (the bridge) · Theodor

➡️ Next: Back to the curriculum