awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator is a multi-agent orchestrator that keeps AI coding CLIs such as Claude Code, Kiro, and Codex in individually isolated tmux sessions and coordinates them together. Commit ab9bbaab on 2026-11-02 made it so that specifying effort: "auto" for an ephemeral (ephemeral) agent causes the effort value to be asked of the external decision point effort.route at execution time. The commit message states that this effort path is a new feature (#1171). The scale of the change is 6172 lines added and 265 lines deleted.
This path calls the decision point only in three places: right after the agent is claimed and just before binding, in the assign path and the two handoff paths. If effort is specified or omitted, it does not ask. If the decision point is off or in shadow mode, it runs with the ephemeral.default_effort value; if it is on, it uses only trustworthy answers, clipped to the [min_effort, max_effort] range and applied only to that execution, and falls back to the default if the answer is unusable. An ephemeral.min_effort lower bound was introduced along with it. If the specified effort is lower than the floor, it is rejected with effort_below_policy, and decision answers are raised above the floor before being applied.
The CHANGELOG of the same commit adds provider: "auto" and the new decision point provider.route("Which CLI should run this task?") as provisional. provider.route is off by default, and it is written that because there is not a single valid set among the currently provided providers, no routing takes place. This is a stage where only the operating slot has been prepared.
The supported scope on the effort side is narrow as well. The only providers stated to honor effort are Claude Code (outside the native agent) and Codex; with the rest, it is recorded as not_honored without asking. auto requires both min_effort and max_effort (auto_requires_bounds), and when model and effort are both auto, claim_lease_seconds must be set to at least 2 * decisions.on_timeout_ms / 1000 + 30. The auto_requires_decision_platform rejection is gone. A set of nullable columns is added to the records and it is upgraded without backfill. To put this combination into real operation, the supported providers and the configuration conditions must be checked first.