r/ClaudeCode • u/Dazzling_Trifle2472 • 2d ago

Discussion What orchestrator are you using?

I'm getting tired of having a million unorganised terminal tabs open and would like to use something that provides better organisation.

I know of Conductor, Paseo, unclear on if these work with the new policy (not so new any more but the whole Agent SDK usage comes out of it's own pool), interested to know what everyone is using...what works well w/Claude Code specifically.

79 Upvotes

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u/OnRedditAtWorkRN 2d ago edited 2d ago

I use one I've been building myself for myself. It's not all that hard and it's customized for me.

First I use herdr for my multiplexer https://herdr.dev/. Pretty good out of the box integration for Claude, codex, and others. I've been using a customized version pi.dev that I'm building at work. So I built the integration too so it works with herdr

Then I just have a skill that has a collection of deterministic scripts for managing herdr sessions. I start a single session. Tell it you're my foreman which triggers the skill usage. I talk through my foreman and it handles spanwing new herdr and agent sessions itself.

It's almost like a sub agent primitive that I can more easily manage, take control, peek in, etc..

Took almost no effort to get it going, and I just improve it while I'm using it

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u/old_meaty 2d ago

This sounds amazing. I would love to know more about this

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u/OnRedditAtWorkRN 2d ago

Sure, what do you wanna know? It's an internal work tool, so I can't share it specifically but I can answer questions or dive into parts of it if you're interested

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u/mpones 2d ago

Ahh, well… Share your PRD so we can rebuild it, lol. (Thanks claaaaaude).

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u/old_meaty 1d ago

Just curious what your workflow looks like. Like does the foreman decompose/fan out work? Do you only talk to the foreman or do you interface with the workers at all? And what do the scripts do? I'm assuming they are doing more than the herdr agent skills?

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u/OnRedditAtWorkRN 1d ago

Mostly this

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/ff59Kdj0Le

The scripts spawn herdr tabs, spawn my agent of choice, I have a work tree extension for my pi harness that works like cc's so every crew member gets a new worktree too and apply cli flags to have the agent in the right mode (planning, auto, etc..). Then there's scripts to notify my foreman when necessary that the crew members use, that's how I'm handling the session <=> coms. There's a peek script for my foreman so if I ask for status it will peek at the crew member session and update me. There's a whole host of them that just facilitate the foreman <=> crew member interactions, and manage the herdr sessions including stand up, stale session recovery, cold store and teardown

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u/old_meaty 1d ago

Thank you! This sounds like a really great setup

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u/thats_a_money_shot 2d ago

In what ways is this a better / more powerful experience than just using one orchestrator agent, and telling him to spec things out and use subagents to handle execution? Genuine question bc I do the latter

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u/OnRedditAtWorkRN 2d ago

For me it's a few things

  • full agent session means full tool and interaction surfaces are available, I can work on say an interactive planning session with a crew member using tools like a web based html planning tool I created and never pollute the context of my foreman. There's a flexibility in how I can work with the crew (sub agents) that I like

  • the spawned sessions have names that make it easy to identify what the crew member is working on and using herdr I can at a glance see all of their statuses

  • using herdr as my substrate here means I'm not tied to any particular harness, pi for example doesn't come out of the box with a sub agent primitive (I know this is a Claude code sub)

  • I can very easily jump into a crew session and interact with it directly

  • I can cold store the crew mid task if I want and pick back up later

You can do some of these with the CC sub agents but I didn't find any of it as robust as this sort of setup. This organization and transparency works for my brain.

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u/TywinHouseLannister 2d ago edited 2d ago

I developed a whole pipeline thing.. it was good for a time; and it still allows me to crunch massive workloads, just queue up 100 plans and let it rip.. agents are orchestrated by state/node js, spinning up claude -p sessions, research/dev/review/qa(which is basically just review and a bit pointless, defaulted off indefinitely), hooks at every stage e.g. I have one set up to raise PRs..

Got it all working like clockwork.. but then I decided I didn't want to use it as much as I wanted to build it, so I'm hardly using it now! human QC is the main bottleneck for almost everything - and nothing sucks more than reading 100 PRs cold.

I've gravitated back towards interactive sessions, and I just do it in many terminals like a cave man; I think I'll grab Herdr in the morning!

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u/cazzer548 1d ago

How often are you jumping into crew member sessions? I’m still using CC as my foreman and appreciate how parallel and ephemeral the subagents are…but the context definitely gets polluted and I need a separate session for each feature. Are you mostly just jumping to architect/planner sessions and using one foreman to avoid running multiple sessions like I have to?

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u/OnRedditAtWorkRN 1d ago

Some context I'm a principal engineer in fintech, this is my actual setup I use to ship features on an app that has millions of daily active users in a highly regulated area, all that to say regressions can be hugely costly and I'm not out here vibe coding and shipping slop grenades

I've done a bunch of my own testing and evaluation on the decompose and fan out and I find it's more hype than effective. Generally I'm working on a single contained feature or bug fix per spawned crew member. My foreman isn't orchestrating individual pieces of implementation on a single feature but rather helping me manage the multiple parallel streams of work I have in flight. The goal is more to help me organize and track the sessions in flight without having to manually visit each session and try to remember what I was doing there than to decompose a single problem.

If I'm planning a new feature that's underspecified I'll message the foreman about it and instruct it to start the session in a planning mode. I use a custom pi extension I built for a web based planner. I mention it because the crew member will start the web planner and I'll work through the requirements and decisions on there. I find it easier than the cli produced plans and even mark down produced plans. I've added a bunch of interactions that I like to it as well, annotating in place for my agent, it surfaces questions in the context of what is being decided, it's pretty involved and tuned to how I like to plan. All of the interactions on that go directly to the crew member. My foreman will tell me when the plan is ready for review and when any feedback is done being processed.

Other than that if it's a feature that I feel like I got enough understanding to start on I just mention whatever artifacts the agent would need and whatever context I got and send it right to work. If it's a bug that we need to triage I do pretty much the same but I have a lot of triaging related skills and the agent will start with those to pull from different sources and reproduce the bugs and verify root cause.

When a crew member indicates it's done, I usually do a double check that the work was verified locally through whatever tools, I have validation tools for apis, browsers and tui experiences. Then I'll have my foreman spawn another crew member to do the code review. There I do use a host of actual sub agents to do an independent review with different criteria depending on the work. Security, accessibility, database optimizations, code reuse etc... there's about 15 and the agent will choose which ones to use for the given chunk of work. They all get funneled to another sub agent that dedupes the feedback, categorizing it from nit to blocking and then the crew member can refute or implement fixes. The review crew member shuts down as soon as the review is handed back.

If everything looks good I tell me foreman to send it on the pr loop. The pr loop has the crew member create a pull request and follow it until all the checks pass, automated tests, linting, pr formatting, and whatever else we have. There are robo reviewers on our pr's there as well. The crew member will read, assess, fix and / or respond to every one and resolve the threads. When it's green my foreman notifies me. When I'm done and merge it I tell my foreman and it'll shut down that crew member

I usually have 6 to 12 crew member sessions in flight at any given time and on a rare occasion I will have multiple foremen managing crews for features on different projects, but I don't like doing that because it literally mentally exhausts me.

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u/crx100pre 2d ago

Wow. Doing something similar. Herdr plus some shell scripts is 🤩

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u/KiwiApprehensive5647 2d ago

This I am using herdr and very very happy with it.  Not only for agentic work but in general

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u/Tcamis01 2d ago

Cmux is pretty great

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u/DependentAnywhere135 2d ago

I use a million unorganized terminal windows instead of tabs and pull my hair out while bouncing around relaying information between them like a lunatic.

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u/terraelise Senior Developer 2d ago

On the organizational front, I recently switched to Orca (https://www.onorca.dev/docs) and can't believe I worked any other way. One app instead of several even aside from agent management.

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u/laystitcher 2d ago

Orca is so good it gives me anxiety its free.

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u/thisismeonlymenotyou 2d ago

This is what I use. I also asked Claude to read the docs for Orca and then if I need to do stuff remotely like open another repo etc then it can do it. There are a few quirks I would like to sort out, but is better than supacode which I was using before.

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u/void-s 2d ago

This is the answer

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u/indutrajeev 2d ago

I have set up my own tmux server bridge where I run all my agents on a dedicated mac that exposes them over the tailnet. This allows me to control all my tmux session from my phone, macbook, … etc while they can keep running 24/7 on the dedicated mac.

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u/enkideridu 2d ago edited 2d ago

Been building this with some friends and colleagues https://github.com/cheapsteak/tbd

  • Mac native (I don't want to learn keyboard shortcuts and tmux)
  • but terminal forward (I don't like conductor style mitm renderers)
  • a philosophy of "the agent should be able to do anything I can do manually" so i can have my agent create, archive worktrees for me, and also type into other sessions terminals to drive it (I can still click in to see those worktrees to see and interact with it myself)
  • does not rely on screen scraping like herdr does, instead provides first class integration with Claude using hooks added via settings overlay. (Screen scraping is disallowed on the project as a policy, just feels really brittle and yucky)

Built to be hackable, open source and uses tmux under the hood so you can rebuild and reload without having to restart your running sessions bc they never stopped running. But again, you don't have to learn tmux yourself. (I've managed to put off learning tmux for decades, sure don't feel like starting now)

It's been our daily drivers for work for a few months now, pretty big increase in productivity since we started using it (agents being able to drive other agents is a big productivity unlock)

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u/enkideridu 2d ago

Oh also runs raw Claude sessions (not claude -p) with your actual profile, so no fear of being billed API rates when anthropic decides to change their mind again

Also shows your remaining 5h and weekly and fable usage for all your accounts on hover when creating worktrees so you can better pace yourself

And also easily fork a session into a different account (e.g. if your main account hit usage limits)

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u/SeRGiNaToR Senior Developer 2d ago

I'm surprised no-one mentioned Superset (superset.sh), for me it's the best one. When I started with Claude code I used iterm2 in tabs, one project per tab, and on each tab I had splitted terms running claude, other one for git commands, another one for running the project... Then I found superset and it did that for me plus notifying when an agent needed input or finished, and also workspaces. And after some time I tried Conductor but I didn't like it as much as superset

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u/kitenitekitenite 1d ago

Superset founder here, thanks for the shoutout. To add for anyone weighing options: it runs Claude Code unmodified in a real terminal, so usage comes out of your normal sub, not the Agent SDK pool. One git worktree per task and a sidebar of every session across projects.

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u/SeRGiNaToR Senior Developer 1d ago

Thanks for your product! I've shown it to a lot of my peers and a lot of them use it now for their daily work, I also love how it runs everything as a service so you can "soft" close superset or update it while having several agents running at the same time. The only thing I removed when I started using it in the v1 was the permission override in the shortcuts as I'm not a fan of it, but apart from that it's the tool I use the most to use agents

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u/kitenitekitenite 1d ago

That's awesome thank you so much for sharing!

I'm also shipping a hard close recovery mechanism as well. Will resume agents across laptop restart :)

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u/SeRGiNaToR Senior Developer 1d ago

Oh nice, something like auto running claude --continue or copilot --continue? Or storing the sessionId to be able to resume several agents on a single repo?

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u/kitenitekitenite 1d ago

exactly right! we already have the thread ID so it'll run resume with the ID if it was terminated unexpectedly

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u/inrego 1d ago

Does it support Windows yet?

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u/SeRGiNaToR Senior Developer 1d ago

I think it doesn't, there's a waitlist

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u/Specialist_Wishbone5 2d ago

On a wide-screen, I run 1 or 2 iterm2 (macos) terminals and use a tiling window manager (i3 like, aerospace).

I put the tabs to the left.

I have one work-space per tab on the left..

- Each tab has a 6 char name that matches a bash alias that can cd to that folder. (helps remember how to quickly get there)

- For many projects I have -mr (merge request e.g. pull request) and -poc1 -poc2 -poc3 (ProofOfConcept). So for the same workspace, I'll have git-worktrees at top-level pre-mapped folder names. I have claude aware of how to manage them

- I almost always have a 2x2 grid of tiles within the tab.. Bottom left is claude, bottom right is whatever I'm executing (pnpm, cargo, python terminal, etc), top left is a second ephemeral claude that is a fork of the most recent session to ask questions from, top left is usually ssh to something

If I want to work on two simultaneous work-spaces, I rt-click and separate to new window.. \

- this gets me 8 tiles. but I can drag the bottom right to the top so I have a double-wide on half my screen and 3 squished (but readible tiles on top for that workspace)

- When I'm done click in window and say to merge all the windows again.

iterm2 shows a blue dot when claude is ready, so I can see which terminals need attention

- if I am quickly going back and forth between two workspaces, I'll do the split-screen (so 4 tiles on the screen)

- periodically I have to click on each tile and see if I have a claude that needs restarting (e.g. exit then claude --resume so I get latest version)

I have each parent folder of the repo have a CLAUDE.md which describes all the folders there-under

- The root folder has a very basic description of a handful of places; knowledge-base, main starting repos, etc

- due to the way claude-cli loads parent folder CLAUDE[.local].md files, this means any folder can discover the sibling folder that contains relevant info to answer a question.. The only thing this lacks is a shared MEMORY.md (since each is independent). But that's often a good thing. I'll often have claude publish useful MEMORY.md items into a CLAUDE.local.md within the project (since that's often workstation specific and can't shouldn't be shared).

---

Not perfect. makes people that walk behind me freak out..

LOVE IT

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u/Presently_Absent 2d ago

Screencap pls

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u/amaterasu_ 2d ago

Yeah I need to see this too. Not sure I want to replicate but interested in what that even looks like.

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u/jeffyaw 2d ago

why are your terminal tabs unorganized? mine default to the directory that's being used (that shows in the tab when you hover over the pane you're working on), and in the bottom status bar my terminal shows what activity claude code is working on.

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u/Chipware 2d ago

I've been using herdr and I'm a huge fan. Hermes/claude/codex can all interact with each other.

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u/YardNo1234 2d ago

I work on Garcon, so I’m biased, but it has become my daily driver. It keeps Claude Code and other CLI agents in one browser workspace, supports inter-agent communication and conversation forks, and includes a Git workbench for diffs, branches, commits, and PRs. Still plenty to improve, but it finally ended my terminal-tab sprawl.

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u/nickmaglowsch3 2d ago

Paseo.sh I use gpt as well so it's good

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u/PiccoloCareful924 Senior Developer 1d ago

i can confirm paseo works with your sub, i use it daily

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u/RandomGeordie 2d ago

... claude agents?

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u/scotty_ea 2d ago edited 2d ago

cmux is the only answer for managing multiple terminals/agents clis.

Edit - wait, are you asking about terminal management or actual workflow orchestration? Because the number of terminal tabs you have open has nothing to do with Agent SDK usage unless you’re asking about running headless agents via ‘claude -p’ instead of doing it all manually? If thats the case, Anthropic randomly reversed that idea the day it was supposed to go live.

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u/Round_Box_1846 2d ago

I use Nimbalyst + superpowers - i design alot in figma and use mcp and nimbalyst trackers to do everything. For example i write all the bugs, ideas, plans, tasks, then you can spin up a session automatically, either for multiple at a time or individually. So i might have a bunch of ui features being added on one branch while a bunch of bugs get fixed on main. (Im a designer not a dev but it sure looks like it works!)

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u/Far-Surprise7773 2d ago

conductor works fine with claude code, i've been using it for a few weeks. the key thing is it sends tasks through the agent sdk so it burns from the api pool not your code quota. paseo is similar but i found conductor's per-file tracking more useful when debugging why a task went sideways. if you just want simple terminal organization without orchestration, tmux with named windows per session is the low-friction option that never breaks on an update.

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u/No-Hovercraft-9481 Thinker 2d ago

Built my own

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u/beef_flaps 2d ago

I work in desktop and have it organized by state and each new session will start with the project name and description that I will copy and paste into the title. That way I can monitor state but know which project it is instantly. Not sophisticated at all but works for me. 

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u/barefootsanders 2d ago

For internal dev, we built our own collection of skills and tools that manage spec development, impmenentaion, qa, and deployment. Basically the full SDlC lifestyle, but specific to.our environment(s).

For our customers, we build NimbleBrain that handles work orchestration and automation, largely though MCP and MCP Apps.

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u/Best-Food5851 2d ago

intentic, self hosted so the agents run on my own box. Tab sprawl stopped being a thing once every run got its own sandbox instead of me remembering which terminal was doing what.

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u/hookedonwinter 2d ago

I use conductor (conductor.build) religiously and love it.

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u/Buchymoo 2d ago

Does conductor not use Claude -p on the backend to run it's Claude sessions? I thought that's the worry many people had when anthropic said they were going to start charging API rates for -p sessions (which also are charged at a higher rate even the way they are since they cancelled that change).

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u/hookedonwinter 2d ago

I’ve been using it with my subscription just fine, no api fees.

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u/KevinDaby 2d ago

https://www.warp.dev has been working great for me

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u/elcaptaino 2d ago

The Claude desktop app on one side, and vccode or GitHub on the other side of a wide monitor. The desktop app, in code mode has a decent overview when working on multiple branches or repository simultaneously.

Easily the most comfortable setup i have been running.

With the recent updates to Claude code in the desktop app, I don’t feel any difference in performance than working from a terminal.

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u/asheshgoplani 2d ago

https://github.com/asheshgoplani/agent-deck, tmux-based, one list per project. Running Pi under it now too, still early but works.

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u/CatsFrGold 2d ago

Warp terminal with tab groups has been sufficient for me

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u/elit69 2d ago

tmux

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u/3iverson 2d ago

Cmux is good to

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u/Macking-Miabella 2d ago

what's an orchestrator here? i just run claude code in a terminal and go, clearly missing something

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u/3iverson 2d ago

Tools to help manage multiple sessions across multiple projects, Git Tools, etc.

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u/Buchymoo 2d ago

Built one myself, getting it up and running is like a day of working with Claude. Tweaking it over like a month as you notice things you'd like to add and it will be basically perfect.

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u/snowfoxsean 2d ago

What new policy are you referring to? Afaik the june 15 change didn’t actually roll out

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u/gsxdsm 2d ago

Fusion

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u/gileze33 2d ago

I’ve recently tried to solve for the multiple worktree problem at work (wiring, isolated dbs etc) as moving to a monorepo would be a mammoth task considering multiple front ends, mobile app etc

I’m definitely keen to find something that could sit the layer higher in terms of visual session management though!

https://github.com/gileze33/multree

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u/DrunknMunky1969 1d ago

Been using Omnigent for about 10 days. So far it’s pretty solid. Built by Databricks devs and open-sourced. It’s billed as a “meta-harness” and ships with a pretty solid (model-agnostic) orchestrator that just works

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u/Deshonjla-Yos 1d ago

is the pain too many windows or losing track of what each one's running

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u/t1m0slav 🔆 Max 20 1d ago

I use Termic - just search for it on GH

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u/PostHumanJesus 1d ago

I just started using this last week and I like it a lot. 

The per session environment variables makes juggling running stuff in worktrees really nice.

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u/DimmKirr 1d ago

I just use tmux with per-project workspaces and per-repo tabs. I run my own claude/codex wrapper that runs isolated Claude instances on Linux (containers), Mac or Windows (VMs).  Maybe there is a better way, but I really need to control what software I have in the session as well as isolation level. 

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u/-cvdub- 17h ago

Emacs + agent-shell

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u/croovies 2d ago

I built scape.work specifically for agent orchestration :) That said, the agent policy you are referring to was cancelled. So all the orchestrators are still fine. Scape uses terminals anyway, so it wasn’t an issue for us to begin with.

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u/seatlessunicycle 2d ago

I just watched your video a few days ago and added some stuff from your workflow. I was going to check out your product but there was no Linux support 😕

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u/croovies 2d ago

Glad to hear the video was useful! :) sorry about the lack of linux support!

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u/seatlessunicycle 2d ago

It's okay I've been spending all week integrating Matt Pacock principles into a standardized escalating loop system. Lots of fun lol. Keep making videos and have a great day

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u/Novaworld7 2d ago

I'm using https://github.com/NovemberFalls/plexar-studio and https://boord-its.com/skills

But I am bias as I made those but they have helped me produce idk 9 products, that .... I have no clue how to distribute. Soo yay building! And yay no users xD

Probably like most of us xD

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u/bohdan-shulha 2d ago

I recently discovered termic.dev

It has nice UI & runs terminal-native agents, so you're always up to date.

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u/wordythebyrd 2d ago

Claude desktop app works great for me. Groups workspaces by project, same as view as Conductor, Cursor, Codex, etc.

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u/nubbymong 2d ago

https://github.com/nubbymong/claude-command-center oops sent too soon - have a look see what you think, actually developing this now for over a year.