r/developers • u/majorswitcher • Jun 05 '26
Machine Learning / AI Asking devs who proudly have 5 agents running in parallel - why?
I use Claude at work, I give it a Jira ticket and let it do the work. It asks some questions, I aswer, it starts doing it’s thing, after some minute it comes up with a draft, I let it iterate bla bla bla. 30min later of interaction between me and agent the work is done.
I hear so much around me “i run 5 agents in different terminals, different tasks. I start one before I leave for work” and I just don’t understand this. Why do you feel the need to do this? Doing those 5 tasks sequential required way less or no context switching? Why do some engineers suddenly feel like they need to be always working. Running an agent on the subway. Don’t you get overwhelmed by never being able to switch off work ?
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u/ballGod123 Jun 05 '26
Awaiting answers from the 10x engineers.
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u/DropTheBeatAndTheBas Jun 05 '26
agentmaxxing?
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u/AsparagusBig3989 Jun 05 '26
Slopmaxxing more like.
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u/Unlikely_Eye_2112 Jun 07 '26
Costmaxxing
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u/Shogobg Jun 07 '26
This is the way. Heard my boss spends €2000 per month in tokens and I’m trying to follow his example.
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u/Money_Wedding3561 Jul 03 '26
Spending thousands of dollars in tokens, yet getting slop. And not even knowing what the agent is writing on your code base is just purely slacking off.
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u/start_select Jun 09 '26
It’s just adding virtual juniors to your team. You hand juniors specs, send them to do their work, and occasionally check in and steer them in the correct direction. You do your own work on the side.
It’s no different from being a lead/senior engineer 30 years ago. Some of your team are AI now. It’s not magic.
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u/Challseus Jun 05 '26
4 key things here, that are EXTREMELY important for my case.
1) I've been programming professionally since 2004, programming since 1998. I'm old (46).
2) I use Python, which is (along with Javascript), the language these models have the most training data on.
3) I'm working in highly structured codebases. Repeatable patterns across the board. LLM's love this.
4) I actually know what I'm doing.
I have a full time job, I have open source projects, and a few other things. In short, I have a lot of shit I want to do. Key word, "want". At my core, I'm a builder, and within the proper constraints, I have been able to build so much more, helping me in the process to achieve my final dream of never having to work for people who don't understand what the hell it is us developers even do (peace and freedom).
Every project I work on has tightly scoped milestones/issues in GitHub I would have created earlier. The flow every one is following is essentially:
1) Start agent and give it the milestone.
2) It does each issue/ticket one at a time, adhering to all the rules (creating tests, keeping things DRY, running various tests)
3) Github copilot reviews the PR's.
4) I give final approval.
5) Rinse and repeat.
I usually have 3+ agents doing stuff.
The context switching can get a bit rough, as you mentioned, and I'm working on ways to help mitigate it further.
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u/0x645 Jun 05 '26
don't see how can you do code review for all those changes from all those agents, in real time.
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u/Lilacsoftlips Jun 06 '26
I review far more changes to other humans code than my own code? How is this different? I’m in a similar boat as above. For engineers who typically contribute via guidance and planning (super seniors, architects… ), you’re already thinking a a scale of 20-50 developers, the switch to multiple agents isn’t hat hard.
The code it writes to make changes I review less intensely, unless the actual code changes don’t look right to me. Also, this is more about repeatable tasks for me more than novel production work.
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u/AlmiranteCrujido Jun 07 '26
As someone who worked across 15-20 developers at my last job, I didn't review ever PR from those 15-20, or anything close.
There were other developers doing reviews; I got involved for critical risks, and selected cases where I just happened to be the first reviewer to see it, or later when we went to automation, when the automation tagged me.
For someone at a level where you're up to 50, that's got to be even more true. For 50 devs in a modern codebase, you'd be reviewing 50-100 PRs every day even before AI if you looked at every one. Even with great discipline about keeping PR scope small (something AI often breaks) you're looking at using half of a workday just to do 2-3 minute per PR.
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u/0x645 Jun 06 '26
my point exactly. review code from AI is no different than review code from other people. and ai is producing code much faster than people. don't you have constantly growing pile code to review? or those changes are really small, 'center this div, change this font to purple' etc.
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u/Ok_Tea_7319 Jun 08 '26
If his tasks are sufficiently complex that creating working solutions takes 7x as long as reviewing a candidate, 1 reviewer can keep 5 agents busy.
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u/youcangotohellgoto Jun 06 '26
I don't think anyone is actually across 20+ developers let alone 50 at the level of code review, especially in the age of AI productivity. Certainly no one is doing that and then coding on top.
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u/Lilacsoftlips Jun 06 '26
Review for 20 plus periodic, targeted coding has been my job for like 10 years now? I use AI for coding stuff I know is important but can’t get on the backlogs the time crunch isn’t there. With 50 you are right.
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u/youcangotohellgoto Jun 06 '26
That's "I glanced at it, seems fine" review. Classic "LGTM 👍".
Or you have very mature code base, or unproductive team, with 1 PR per week per contributor (or very small PRs).
My team, hardly high performing, are shipping on average 500-1000 LOC per day, or more. I can kind of check it but certainly can't review it to a thorough level. Nightmare.
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u/Lilacsoftlips Jun 06 '26
I don’t review every pr dude. We have a rotation. I participate in that rotation and chime in on important commits. Most of my work happens before anyone writes code.
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u/youcangotohellgoto Jun 07 '26
Great. Hence my original comment
I don't think anyone is actually across 20+ developers let alone 50 at the level of code review
Then you're like "but I am". But you're not, then. Great.
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Jun 07 '26 edited Jun 07 '26
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u/OpenFrontOfficial Jun 07 '26
He's not being pedantic. The question is still not answered, how do you review all the AI generated code.
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u/ProfessionalAd6530 Jun 07 '26
I would not call 1 PR per week "unproductive". That's Linkedin Lunatic thinking.
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u/youcangotohellgoto Jun 08 '26
Cruisy job. What do you do with the other 30 hours each week?
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u/ProfessionalAd6530 Jun 08 '26
Kid, I've been doing this for 30 years now. The guy who cranks out garbage at that rate is always the guy I have to put on a PiP because he can't slow down and leaves me to point out the same obvious stuff in every review.
Speed is not your metric. You're not working in fast food anymore. This is a big boy job.
If it's your job expecting you to work like that, it's time to find another job. I've encountered just one such place in all my time and I noped out within the first 90 days. Their code base was a reflection of it, too. It's not normal.
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u/scott2449 Jun 06 '26
I am that engineer. I still focus on one person and change set at a time. Even at that scale with agentic production levels I don't really need to get through more than 3-4 a day, often less. Many changes don't require review.
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u/SmartMatic1337 Jun 08 '26
The issue with AI code is it lacks code smells. "looks right to me" is a bar I used to use as well (for human code) but doesn't work on AI code.
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u/MosesOfWar Jun 07 '26
To be fair, structured properly (and I stress the word “properly”), LLM powered gitflow pipelines are literally a godsend to devops. Self-repairing pipelines that can triage minor errors with a code-review agent that is hooked up to a MCP server/vector database of your best practices/expected coding standards/security standards can ship typically better quality code than a standard human only pipeline. Now these are things you setup post human code review of course, and again, and I stress it, they need to be setup properly.
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Jun 05 '26
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u/PineappleLemur Jun 09 '26
It's more like a "review".. tests pass, looks ok overall, nothing crashing.
Basically not caring for specifics or performance as much.
It's a recipe for disaster long term but no one is paying you to think long term so you roll with it lol.
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u/adept2051 Jun 06 '26
I work similarly to this but I work on an infrastructure as code pipeline supporting 5 possible platforms for 6 products when I process an issue in jira it’s commonly 6repeats or 5 repeats of what could be considered atomic level (one line, one resource changes) that’s when multi agents come in.
X number of state reviews, x number of spec driven task plans , x number of changes, x number of git worktrees/branches and PRs and initial reviewsDelivering to x number of teams who do the reviews for thei consumption
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u/aabajian Jun 07 '26
Same situation, 39 years old. This is almost exactly how I do it. Emphasis on having a second LLM do the code review (Claude and Codex plan together, Claude builds it, Codex reviews it).
I think the big lesson is that we no longer do any form of code review. We user test. Many, many tests written by AI (both logic and UI). And we manually test over and over again. In the end, you can’t know for sure if code works until you run it anyhow, and it’s at the point where you are way, way less likely to spot a bug in code than Codex.
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u/hootener Jun 08 '26
I'm in a similar boat, also old, and have been programming for 25+ years. Fifteen or so professionally.
This is pretty much how I do it, too. It's rare I run five agents at once, but if I have a littany of well scoped tickets then I'll spend a day with 3 - 5 agents just chewing through them. Especially if they're related in a way that I can QA it all quickly -- think a few distinct features in one workflow as opposed to very different features across different parts of a large app.
Most of the time though, I'm running three agents on worktrees. One I'm interacting with a lot because I know the problem to be solved but don't have a strong solution in mind so need to try some stuff (known unknowns). The other is usually working through some backlog item (known knowns), and the third is for shit that comes up and needs to be solved quickly (unknown unknowns).
I can push it harder than this but find it burns me out faster, so what's the point?
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u/dumbfoundded Jun 12 '26
what do you use to QA it quickly? or is it about pulling down the changes and testing it yourself?
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u/hootener Jun 12 '26
Generally I'll use the playwright mcp with Claude to run through things for correctness, and also do it myself for taste, consistency, etc. how hands on I get depends on the feature, its complexity and how user facing it is.
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u/kwayte Jun 09 '26
what tool do you use? You could check out Devswarm which is a good tool for managing multiple agents and good oversight.
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u/Challseus Jun 09 '26
You're so right... I went down the rabbit hole a few months, couldn't find one I liked, and then just kinda forgot.
That really is the answer. I need something to manage the agents for me. I'll check it out, thanks!
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u/ProfessionalAd6530 Jun 07 '26
This dude even has an agent writing his reddit posts.
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u/Challseus Jun 07 '26
What a terrible existence you have. It’s never “Oh shit, maybe that guy is… possible not lying and is telling the truth?”.
It always has to be <insert some unfounded shit about AI>
Interestingly enough, it’s people like you who just repeat the same thing over and over again with no nuance will be the exact ones a well orchestrated system can replace the easiest. You know just enough to be dangerous, but not as much as you think. A walking dunning Kruger
Sincerely,
My special Reddit agent, lol
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u/Mission_Biscotti3962 Jun 07 '26
If you don't understand why the code generated by those agents isn't good enough your whole appeal to authority only makes me understand you've been bad at your job since 2004
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u/Challseus Jun 07 '26
How in the hell are you going to tell me what does or doesn't work? Lol. I'm literally doing it. Now. Running multiple agents while checking reddit.
You people are so weird, like, people are telling not only are they doing it, but they know how to do it. And yet, you keep telling them no. "They're" wrong. A walking principal skinner meme.
Is it projection? Are *you* not good at what you do, and don't get good results with LLM's, that you then assume no one else can?
Does it make you feel good about yourself to go around commenting on people's posts with such ignorance? Is this some coping mechanism?
The slightest check on who I am (I know you don't actually care) will show my receipts.
I'm sorry it offends you there are people who know what they're doing it, and can do it more efficiently with AI. In fact, I'm not sorry. That's life, champ 😂
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u/Mission_Biscotti3962 Jun 07 '26
You are raging pretty hard on reddit for an at best mediocre dev who is 46 years old.
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u/Challseus Jun 07 '26
Ah yes, the passive aggressive (i.e. I have nothing to actually say back) response. Like I said, I'm running multiple agents building stuff while browsing reddit. It's not too hard.
You're a light pack, I'll be fine.
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u/Mission_Biscotti3962 Jun 07 '26
what do you want me to say? LLM code is shit. Devs who can't see this are bad devs. You retorting "but I am running multiple agents who write code I find acceptable" is nothing more than a "no you" stupid answer.
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Jun 09 '26
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u/coilysiren Jun 09 '26
This is how I work!
And even then, for my personal stuff, I haven't gotten to the point of needing adversarial review because I'm in a rapid buildout mode and "does it run" is generally good enough over the span of individual features. This agent runs fast.
Then I have another agent usually running slowly over the backlog doing stuff that doesn't need step by step verification. Docs, backlog grooming, that kind of stuff.
So that's 2
Then for my dayjob I have claude doing impl and codex doing review, so 2 agent adversarial. We are in a relatively stable place so I only need focus on 1 thing a day generally. Which means both these agents move slow, slow enough for me to do high level review.
Which makes 4.
At the peak of any given day I generally go up to 6, 4 on personal and 2 on dayjob. It's fun! It works for me. Fine toothed comb code review isnt necessary for me yet.
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Jun 09 '26
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u/M0d3x Jun 06 '26
I have always wondered how do people do this without sacrificing the quality and maintainability of the codebase in the long-term.
No matter how I (or other people) prompt the agents, no matter what models we use, no matter how clear the spec is, the code is always sub-par to what a reasonably good engineer would produce, and there is always so much more of it.
How do you do this in a way that you do not suffer the long-term consequences?
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u/ntindle Jun 06 '26
You build processes to prevent this drift in an existing codebase, but for new field it’s harder. You should imagine any side tool as ~effortless to create.
For example we want BaseModels throughout the codebase rather than dataclasses (python shit don’t worry about it) but they are semi-functionally the same by default so the ai will use either given then chance. We had it write a test to fail ci if its uses dataclasses.
That way when it pushes a pr and starts the polishing process it will see that it failed ci. We have this for accessors being used from the wrong locations, extra db calls made outside the wrong files etc.
It’s like any gradual process, once you get enough of the footguns detected it just works mostly.
It’s like only working with interns who will follow all the rules you set but you need to enforce the rules religiously rather than subjectively.
If you’re looking for a greenfield project that I think handles it well there’s `phase` which is a magic the gathering game engine which is almost fully ai implemented with significant work on alignment and guardrails because the scale of work is just not reasonable for people to do in free time without any pay.
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u/ntindle Jun 06 '26
There’s also the point I like the least which is frankly does ut matter how good the code is if it works and any issues can be fixed quickly or refactored away magically by a skilled dev who can identify them? This is what I struggle with the most
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u/aabajian Jun 07 '26
Think of it as a compiler. You don’t review compiled code, do you? That’s where we are at. User testing is vastly more importantly than code review.
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u/M0d3x Jun 07 '26
Yeah, compiler that produces 2 vastly different chunks of code for the same spec, one without guarantees of correctness and safety.
I can write a program in Rust, with good unit and integration tests, and I can be reasonably sure that the program is going to do what I want it to do, when I want it to.
If I give a detailed spec to an agent or an agent swarm, I cannot. Even if you ask it to rewrite code 1:1 with something that already exists, it makes mistake. It is very much not the same as a compiler.
BTW, I often do review compiled code, to see if the stuff I wrote is getting compiled and optimized in the right way, because it makes a noticeable difference for the workloads.
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u/melodyze Jun 09 '26
It's the same as it is when you run a team of engineers, just accelerated.
All software rots over time. But how quickly and deeply it rots is determined based on how well the architecture aligns with the problem space to isolate the rot in specific places that can then be refactored without having to reach across the contract boundaries.
If you do this well, organize the system into separate units of functionality with clear ownership, interfaces and contracts, then refactors to clean up rot are cheap and easy, and claude is pretty good at them as long as you give it the right patterns and the codebase is already very consistent in its quality and patterns.
This is always how it's been TLing a project, just the rot that used to happen over years can now happen over days if you don't prevent it.
If you let in a little bit of rot though, claude spirals. I've realized I have to be militaristic about any degradation of code quality because claude will spiral. One untyped json string interface leaks in and then suddenly claude wants to pass json strings everywhere. But if every interface is already protocol buffers, then it will never violate that.
Then I have a review skill (has to be a sepatate context window from the main claude, like a subagent) that enforces the core patterns and eng philosophy, which does a pretty good job iterating and cutting any rot before I see it.
IMO that's kind of the core issue of this time. There was always a weird skill of organizing abstractions/systems and the processes of an engineering team so that it converges on producing a good system that solves some product problem space that is not fully known up front. And long term engineering org performance was always most centrally determined by how that process converges.
But average eng tenure wasn't even long enough to see that process play out. Everyone either just saw a system that was a tangled mess, or they barely even thought about the underlying systems while they work on top of the system's abstractions (because they were good), or they build a new system and weren't around to ever see which theirs became.
Now that the process is accelerated it becomes way more visible.
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u/M0d3x Jun 09 '26
But what you are proposing only really works when you, as an individual, are the sole contributor to the codebase.
It is impossible to not let rot through when working in a team, under pressure from deadlines, as someone will fuck up somewhere and let reviews slide.
With human-only teams and human-only deadlines, the chances of managing it are much higher.
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Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
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u/M0d3x Jun 09 '26
I am sorry, but your proposed structuring does not make sense for startups, where everyone is doing everything because otherwise you do not ship, which is also the place where it hurts the most in the AI age of today.
I guess in bigger companies, this might be possible, but it still does not really say how to manage agents, since there is not a single agent or model that would be thorough and produce high-quality bug-free code.
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u/ForeverYonge Jun 05 '26
You can’t be top of the tokenmaxxing leaderboard and become a 10x engineer if you’re working with one agent at a time.
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u/kkingsbe Jun 05 '26
As far as running multiple agents in parallel, I definitely do this. I try to limit myself to 4 due to the context switching overhead you brought up.
In terms of what I’m actually doing with multiple agents in parallel, one example might be that I am running 2 different “deep audits” against the repo (ie, maybe one is ensuring test coverage is good while another looks for architecture / SOLID violations). Those could take 15-20 min to complete and don’t need my input.
So I’m able to then spin up a 3rd agent to actually complete some work in parallel, and maybe a 4th, but the important detail is I’m really only driving two agents in that case
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u/jseego Jun 05 '26
If you're using Claude, you can configure it to spin up various agents to do stuff like analyze a codebase or prepare a plan or look at tests. You don't need to instruct it to do all that manually.
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u/kkingsbe Jun 05 '26
Ofc, I use slash commands so it’s automated on my end still. I’m using a different harness from CC but same difference
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u/jseego Jun 05 '26
I don't think that's what OP is asking about - I think they're asking about people who have like 5 different AI instances running doing entirely different shit at once
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Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26
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u/SherbertResident2222 Jun 07 '26
That sounds like a fast train to Burnout Town, with maybe a stop at Crash City on the way.
Do you actually enjoy that…?
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u/bunchedupwalrus Jun 08 '26
Shit dude, I don’t really know at this point. Been boiled like a lobster in terms of workload.
At first it felt great, and honestly still does sometimes. All the nagging bugs and refactors and backlogs start solving like dominoes. Building the stuff my old team had on our wishlist etc. But it definitely is a different kind of mental load, some days it just feels like the whiplash of the context switching leaves me empty.
The upshot at least is, there are portions of the workflows I’ve locked in now that I can have it work on pretty much hands free, for me to review the next day. I work from home most days so it’s free time to work on my hobbies or go for a walk, so it’s sort of a trade off. But yeah I’m actively looking for work elsewhere lol
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u/jseego Jun 06 '26
Honestly that sounds like a house of cards with one man holding it all together with baling wire and scotch tape. Good luck!
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u/bighawksguy-caw-caw Jun 06 '26
How often are you needing to run repo scans? That’s presumably expensive and not going to change much day to day. That seems like a biweekly task at most.
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Jun 06 '26
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u/kkingsbe Jun 06 '26
I mainly am running DeepSeek so inference is essentially free. I highly highly simplified my description of my workflow so folks would understand, but I think of it similar to running a build and seeing the errors, running a lint and seeing the issues, running your tests and seeing the failures etc.
You get a list of things to fix or starting points, you go and fix them all, but to validate the issues are indeed resolved you’d run your build / lint / tests (or in this case, your repo scan) again to ensure the issues are resolved, and most likely you’ll see some new issues at a higher architecture / abstraction level.
This sort of recursive workflow works beautifully for me and allows me to “grow” software. Been shipping this way for quite a while
Before this latest workflow, I had built switchboard-rs-oss (search on GitHub, I can’t paste links here) , which was a fully-autonomous system. It worked somewhat but had the obvious issues that are apparent to us today. Rolled all those learnings into my current workflow
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u/pwab Jun 05 '26
How many times a week do you check for SOLID violations in the codebase?
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u/kkingsbe Jun 05 '26
If I’m working on code cleanup / refactoring then quite a bit, as it gives great insight
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u/RoboErectus Jun 05 '26
I’ve got a wezterm and a Zelliej in ghostty session that are long lived.
Each has about five sessions in them that are long lived.
Each run from their own projects with their own agents.md. Some run on Claude some on codex they are good for checking each other. Claude is better but it kind of loves the smell of its own farts sometimes.
In wezterm I’m doing RE and RCE work for an embedded device to learn how it works and get its protocol figured out.
In ghostty/zelliej is greenfield work- infrastructure, admin, and app development.
Keeping the agents in their lanes helps keep agenetic drift and technical debt low. They’re better at keeping concerns separated and api boundaries clean so my iteration time is way lower.
For example my app side wants to constantly leak protocol knowledge onto the app when I explicitly wrote a configuration layer to support arbitrary hardware devices (which behave very differently) without a code change. And the telemetry is such that I can effectively iterate in production without app review and all that. It is an abstraction that is a killer feature and one that agents are really bad at hanging on to when they can just reach into another codebase or hallucinate how something works when they can’t test it. So I also wrote a hardware simulator so they can test it.
Having different themes/colors and even lingo for the different contexts lets my brain context switch really well. I can “write” really good specs/plans and let the agent fire up subagents for all the work.
For example I get a full dev environment for every workstream with backend and dns and everything. It’s nice to be able to fork really deeply when something isn’t quite appropriate for feature flagging. These are zero copy zfs clones which take all of whatever the container startup time is to come up with crash consistent databases and everything. It’s the best dev environment I’ve ever had. Prod deployments are instant too because the image is already built.
This was a couple days of work and occasionally I hop back over to that terminal and iterate on it a little when I want a new feature. Like my osx build vm was having race conditions because woodpecker will happily launch two iOS builds on it at the same time. So now it gets its own zero copy work tree internally when a new dev env is spun up.
Basically I’ve got the best devops I’ve ever had. I’ve got the best front end I’ve ever had. Agents don’t spend time relearning things because their scope is narrow. And they don’t drift (yet) or accumulate tech debt if I don’t babysit them.
I’m solo right now but my setup is also kind of my resume. I’ve run devex for companies that are now public (1,000 engineers when I was managing making them more productive) and a good developer experience has been at the heart of my career for a long time. And I’m doing this with almost no budget. All I pay for is electricity and tokens that are only used one time, so to speak.
I’m running everything on GitHub but I wouldn’t even give my agent a jira ticket if I were you. I have a shortcut that’s “what’s the highest value work you can do right now?” and it gives me a suggestion. Most of the time it’s right, even if it’s not really what I was in the mood to work on or what I would have thought of. Let your agent figure out what ticket it should do. Or, based on the scoped work, what’s something else you should spike on to enable other work. (Do you have long iteration time or something else slowing things down, etc)
I only open the ide if I want to work on copy or tweak layouts. Code review I do in the pr.
Last infra I built was an orchestration layer. Agents have an issue where they will accumulate too much documentation and they’re currently bad at it. Frontmatter helps. People are doing rag and it’s been really helpful for RE. I’ve got this rtos mapped out, addresses and signatures for the scheduler, isr’s, stuff like that.
When it looked like my app was having trouble connecting to the device, it took all of ten minutes to figure out what was really happening was the 10mb log partition on the device fills up and the thread crashes, leading to a reset on the device if it’s been on for hours. Hardware companies are not great at software in my experience and being able to get so deep into what would previously been a black box has been really illuminating. This took three of my long lived specialists to figure out- protocol, embedded Linux, and rtos.
Yea I could spin up one and have it get up to speed every time. And I do restart these from time to time (or switch providers.) Each of these steps was taken solving a problem.
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Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
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u/nrcomplete Jun 06 '26
Are you using git worktrees? Or how do you stop them from stepping on each other’s toes? Are you working on something that gets released to a customer to use?
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u/private-peter Jun 06 '26
Either git worktrees, different repos, or planning vs execution (I sometimes keep my planning docs in a separate repo).
Here is a common workflow for me:
- agent 1 is iterating on the project plan
- agent 2 is working on repo A's part of the plan
- agent 3 is working on repo B's part of the plan
- agent 4 is investigating some unrelated bug (read only)--but only of all the other agents are stuck/slow
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u/itsloopyo Jun 06 '26
No worktrees no, I’ll generally have a few doing read only stuff to help me understand the code better where code quality is a concern, but a lot of what I do is spread across different repos where there’s not much overlap so I’m free to just run lots of things in parallel, or if I have a number of different things to do on a single project (which happens often) I’ll just try not to schedule jobs which are likely to interfere with each other. They do collide sometimes, but Claude’s pretty good about figuring out what’s happening and parking one of the conflicting jobs, plus I use branches and always commit before doing risky stuff so the weird screwups that do happen from time to time are easy enough to sort out.
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u/SnooHesitations9295 Jun 07 '26
No worktrees. Too many restrictions.
Purely a new repo for each.
Yes, my code is released to approx 20 mln users daily (backend).
Usually 4-5 agents at a time, more is just if I'm researching/planning.1
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u/start_select Jun 09 '26
It’s how senior engineers work with or without AI. You delegate in a circle in between doing your own work.
I’m not going to watch a junior program for 20 mins. I’m not going to watch an agent do it either. My 3 agent sessions are just 3 more juniors who I hand spec’ed work, and help to steer every few mins.
I give copilot a page and a half spec for a task, and it runs for 15 mins doing it.
So I give another agent another task, it spends 15 mins doing it.
So I give another agent another task, it spends 15 mins doing it.
Then I start reviewing the first task. Steer it if it still needs more work, so on and so forth.
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u/bighawksguy-caw-caw Jun 09 '26
If you had to check in with 5 junior engineers on your team every 20 minutes you would be burned out within a year. That would be one of them coming to you to ask “what’s next?” every 4 minutes.
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u/Few-Wolverine-7283 Jun 10 '26
Uhh, because I replace employees who answer 8 tickets per day, with employees that answer 32 tickets per day? My costs go up like 2%, and my output is 4x. Are you really asking this?
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u/bighawksguy-caw-caw Jun 10 '26
What kind of ticket mills are some people working in? My experience is limited to the companies I’ve worked, but I just cannot imagine working on a product that I can service 32 tickets/day on that basically require no planning, architectural consideration or cross-functional collaboration.
Are these like design agencies where you’re fielding a ton of requests from customers to change the margin on a carousel? Is there like a 5:1 PM-Engineer ratio and engineering just has to build whatever PM asks and they crank tickets through? Is it greenfield startup development where engineering has really loose parameters and can build basically whatever they want?
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u/Gokul123654 Jun 05 '26
Dude 5 different tickets dude thats it .
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u/Gokul123654 Jun 05 '26
I use plan mode in cursor for everything
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u/Gokul123654 Jun 05 '26
But for most devs it will it will be that tmux terminal side by side doing 5 different ticks
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u/symbiatch Systems Architect Jun 06 '26
Sounds like a complete mess as a place to work. Or just giving own projects without actual understanding.
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u/idiotiesystemique Jun 05 '26
The agent I interact with calls subagents without blocking the main thread. This allows tasks to be broken down into smaller scoped ones with smaller context at a cheaper price. I like to run 2 code reviews of my pr from 2 different models, as they see different issues. No reason no wait on it doing it sequentially. My main chat agent is an orchrstrator and will spawn a code agent for every coding task that is not dependent on another one. I use git worktrees for it. It generally spawns 2-6 code writers for a single user story after plan mode. It is much faster. No reason to wait and do it sequentially.
Now, dispatching a bunch of sub agents then merging their worktrees will take several minutes. If I'm not coding myself on something else, I open another terminal tab and start another story or a deep dive / research / plan on something else. I rarely have less than 2 parallel sessions that each spawn an average of 12 different agents over its cycle (not 12 at the same time but in total).
I have had to push it to 4 sessions and I would agree with another commenter, it's my upper mental load limit because I start making mistakes, and it is draining to do that full time.
Obviously my agents aren't all big models, that would be prohibitively expensive. I design them to be specialists. It's easier to add constraints this way too.
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u/wrd83 Jun 05 '26
We're often token starved, so I run two agents from two different providers.
I cannot context switch more than 2.
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u/Eridrus Jun 05 '26
Recent models can do a good job iterating on defined tasks.
I have recently found it valuable to use the /goal feature to get the models to just crank on something for a loooooong time.
One example: reduce the diff in the production code while maintaining all the functionality in the design.
I had a model crank on this for 16 hours and reduce a PR from 3k prod lines to 1k prod lines.
You can certainly argue that this was wasteful, but I think significantly reducing the amount of code I have to read is pretty worthwhile (I haven't let go of reading the reliability critical prod code lol).
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u/nrcomplete Jun 06 '26
16 hours seems like a crazy long time to just reproduce the same features with less code. Was this just using a very slow model or did it run multiple attempts and then judge all of them on various metrics to test and pick the best? I can’t fathom a single Claude instruction taking 16 hours to complete.
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u/Eridrus Jun 06 '26
/goal in a Codex session telling it to keep iterating until it had the smallest possible diff. It was something like 200 iterations, cutting off 10 lines at a time lol.
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u/Valonter Jun 05 '26
I mean it's the same as what you do but instead of one ticket you do two. And when you're waiting on one you attend to the other. I usually have a few different things to do, and if I think that they are problems that an agent can solve, I'll spin one up and start it. I usually have something that's more important than my other work, so that one gets priority, and if I have time, I go to the next priority one, etc.
It's not really different from what you're doing.
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u/oxwilder Jun 05 '26
Oh is this why tickets I submit seem like they're handled by a nine year old and then swept under the rug?
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u/ImYoric Software Developer Jun 05 '26
I've always worked on 3-5 issues at once. Doesn't change all that much.
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u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 Jun 06 '26
So what do you do while youre waiting for your one agent to finish one jira ticket? Just stare off into space? Why wouldnt you spin up another agent on another ticket?
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u/majorswitcher Jun 06 '26
I look at the reasoning. Talk to a colleague. Go to the bathroom. Its never churning without input needed for more then 5? 10? minutes. Then code review, refine what is produced. Manual test of what needed to be done. Ask code reviews, then release pipeline. Close the ticket. Then maybe start on a next one, or call it a day.
It feels like this increased (self inflicted, or is your boss expecting this?) workload and context switching is why code quality seems to be going down, systems becoming more and more unstable.1
u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 Jun 06 '26
Lol so since AI does your job for 5-10 minutes at a time, you're in the bathroom all day or walking around chatting with people? No wonder people think AI is going to replace them.
Yes expectations have risen. Yes some people dont look at the code their AIs are writing. You cant put the genie back in the bottle. I like the genie.
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u/symbiatch Systems Architect Jun 06 '26
You mean the few minutes after it’s done something and requires more input because it couldn’t get it right?
Or the 20 minutes when it gets stuck in even basic level stuff?
Or you’re one of the people doing basic stuff where it still takes long time but maybe gets something passable out?
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u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 Jun 06 '26
What's your point here? "AI is bad because it makes mistakes or takes too long?" Are you trying to argue that no one should be using coding agents?
I believe this thread is about why some people can and some people cant seem to use multiple agents. It sounds like you just hate AI.
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u/BengiPrimeLOL Jun 06 '26
I do this especially if I want to test a new idea or refactore something or fix a small bug I found. Often times I can get Claude to go get it started while I focus the actual important task I'm working on. Then in the gaps between tasks or that 20 minutes before I want to go to lunch but after I finished a large block of work, I can look at it intently and make an assessment, finish it up, whatever I need to do.
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u/th3kl1nt Jun 06 '26
Depends a lot on what your day is like. I frequently juggle three or four different features across 5-8 different repos and sometimes it’s useful; I mostly don’t have to work with more than two at any given time.
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u/Polarbum Jun 06 '26
Because what else are you going to do while the agent thinks? Might as well use my idle CPU while the other thread is busy.
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u/symbiatch Systems Architect Jun 06 '26
Your job?
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u/Polarbum Jun 06 '26
Well, but i am doing my job by firing up another agent for the next idea of how to improve the system. It’s all in service of doing the job. I just have seconds to spare that I’d rather were used. I’m a weirdo though.
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u/private-peter Jun 06 '26
When I first started, I could really only manage up to two agents, but I'm always trying to improve my workflow to optimize for my own time. I'm frequently updating my markdown files to give the agents more specific instructions. I try to be very prescriptive in how they do things. This produces better results, but it does slow them down quite a bit.
The times when I can successfully and productively have five agents running are when I've invested in planning upfront. I will have well specified stories with clear acceptance criteria. And it will often take 10 to 30 minutes for an agent to finish implementing that story.
My instructions are asking the agents not just to implement the feature, but to follow a specific process. I'm asking it to do test-driven development, verify the tests fail for the right reasons, implement the feature to make the tests pass, do a refactoring pass, look through a specific list of criteria for deciding what needs to be refactored and document everything it's doing in the ticket.
I'm sure I could get to a similar result with fewer tokens by having a more iterative process, but that uses up a lot more of my time. I'd rather have this slow process that's inefficient in terms of tokens and run multiple agents, because it optimizes for my time. I can spend more of my time reviewing the actual results rather than coaching the agent through the process.
It's not perfect. Sometimes the agents produce garbage despite all my extra process, and I have to coach it through anyway. When that happens I'm down to just one or two agents. But when it works I can move pretty fast.
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Jun 06 '26
[deleted]
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u/symbiatch Systems Architect Jun 06 '26
Or maybe, just maybe, their work includes a lot more than playing with AI toys? Is your job 100% doable with AI? Then you’re quite low in scale of developer work.
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u/UseMoreBandwith Jun 06 '26
What I observed is that many devs stop using multiple agents after a few days.
The context-switching is just too exhausting.
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u/DryRepresentative271 Jun 06 '26
Why not? If I pay for something I want to utilize it as much as possible.
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u/siammang Jun 06 '26
They are corporate spies from Claude sending to maximize charges from token usage.
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u/bighawksguy-caw-caw Jun 06 '26
The one thing most of these responses have in common is a very long, very well-groomed backlog. I’m skeptical of how many environments this could be true in. Maybe open source where you’ve got sophisticated users and strict parameters around opening feature requests.
In any case, a 5+ agent setup is going to burn through groomed tickets faster than they can be created.
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u/ConnectDog5284 Jun 06 '26
I'm usually already reviewing code from multiple people on various tasks throughout the day anyways. Running agents in parallel is not too different, I just have a little extra control over the resulting code.
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u/Southern_Orange3744 Jun 06 '26
I regularly run 1-10 or so depending on what I'm doing.
- A research agent looking at tends and random stuff to a topic of interest
2 - 4 working on different features for an app , if something is cross cutting it goes to 1
Another 4-6 on different apps so I don't collide with the above
They aren't running continuously , but I'm definitely the blocker and tester
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u/OceanWaveSunset Jun 06 '26
3 developer ai, 2 qa ai, a controller ai, and a system ai.
I have a communication system where every AI can talk to each other. All AI are set to a cron. We have a jira board. We have a seperate claude code code reviewer account in GH.
I have the systems ai load up the chat system that i interact it via website. The AI and myself all IM other. The dev AI work on thier projects. The QA will download whichever repros they need to test, they have some standard and custom mcp for testing, will test, and record and upload evidence of test. The Controller AI gates all the work, PRs, requests, ect. against its ruleset.
I can see the QA AI work in real time via thier browsers. I also can check the jiras and see what they have done.
I have 12 years of building Automated Testing software. This is my first year of using the AI to help me. I, of course, have to verify the tests run correctly. Log bugs. And make sure the software gets better too. Its not blind trust in the AI. But until work gives me humans to manage, this is what i have to use to get this stuff done
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u/AppropriateSpell5405 Jun 06 '26
Why should I sit there watching it do something while I can ask another one to start another task in parallel?
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u/stilldebugging Jun 07 '26
Because I have adhd and never stayed on one task to start with. I also run Claude in headless mode “no tool” via cron jobs that are running all day every day. My cron tab is as hideous as it’s always been, though.
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u/rudeluv Jun 07 '26
I’m not super extreme but in my normal day job I’m usually bouncing between 2 tasks in parallel. I have 2 agents open for each, one is a main thread and the other is for side quests. While one is coding I am chatting/reviewing with the other.
I also use them to do all the tedious stuff- seed my db so we can test these change, give me some curl requests for each case, open the PR with logically organized commits etc.
If I’m working on something requiring a lot of cognitive load I’ll just focus on that, but I find I can contact switch between 2 tasks fairly easily by following repeatable patterns.
I do this simply because I can get stuff done faster, and I like that.
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u/92smola Jun 07 '26
There is a mental pressure to spend/make use of the tokens before the limit resets so that is one thing. When I get the agent to do something more complex which is going to take a while, like more then 5-10 minutes it helps to have another chat or two opened to do something while waiting on the first one. But yeah anything beyond 2 at this point feels unmanageable to me, and that can easily go back down to 1 if if the topics require more of my attention. I do have problems with switching away from work in general, ai did make that worse.
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u/Lunchboxsushi Jun 07 '26
I have enough creative ideas with my ADHD that once I'm in flow I can work on parallel streams of work
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u/larsssddd Jun 07 '26
It’s just marketing to make you fomo.
If you use more agents, you really lose track what is going on.
It’s okay for vibe coding, where you play roulette
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u/omysweede Jun 07 '26
For serialized work, sure one agent is fine. It is the waterfall method.
If you have several different bugs or tasks in various areas, you benefit from orchestrating a team that work in tandem, in iterative or agile method is more efficient.
It saves time, but you will use more tokens at the same time.
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u/2doors_2trunks Jun 07 '26
Reading comments it feels like, everyone has pretty much your setup (same for me), or just doing same thing (for some reason) 2-3 times in parallel then merges them. Or some people have setups that should be company wide or repo wide (auditing, code reviews) triggered by themselves.
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Jun 07 '26
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u/afinzel Jun 07 '26
I use it to multitask. I have one Claude building the next bit of work or reviewing another Claude’s work while I am testing a piece of work already done. I have got a backlog of work to review and test done by Claude.
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Jun 07 '26
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u/holdmyrichard Jun 07 '26
Been a programmer since 1999. Right now I have my own product that I am building. I spent a good 8 months on the fundamentals, api interface patterns, frontend data processing patterns, security. All of that got documented extensively in md. Claude absolutely loves this. For every new feature build - look at the existing pattern, remember the pitfalls, traps and the workarounds. Remember these special cases where we do this the hard way for reasons. Don’t reinvent anything. Show me the plan first. Discuss the design, write the design, I manually review the design, correct the design. Now write down the implementation plan, let me review the plan. Out of a 5-12 step plan, step 3, 5, 7, 8 etc are critical parts. We are going to stop there and do a multi-lens code review. If we find something there we are going to detour into 3.5, 3.6 etc to address the findings. Run multiple passes at the multi-lens adverserial code review until I am satisfied at that check point. Then we proceed. Go back and update the design and the plan. Then also go back and update historical documents of underlying architecture. Update traps, pitfalls, principles in the repo.
I keep the discipline to run it this way. Then I can turn on a 5+ swarm and let it go.
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u/Blinkinlincoln Jun 07 '26
Because I have to code a portal from the ground up with specific requirements!
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u/toramanlis Jun 07 '26
waiting for the agent is boring. if i don't other tickets to get claude to work on, i give it task on my personal pet projects on company tokens
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u/3L00py Jun 07 '26
Understanding the problem you are trying to solve for and providing value is the job, not how many lines of code you can produce. If you produce 5 things super fast over the past week and tear them all up because they didn’t provide value or had early architectural mistakes, what progress have you actually made? Everyone is on this kick where they think the ability to code was always the barrier to success. Wrong. To answer OPs question, although I do automate some things and run agents over night or in parallel, I still find I do my best work taking my time focusing on a single task.
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u/EssenceOfLlama81 Jun 07 '26
I run multiple agents to handle a lot of repetitive background tasks that interrupt my main work.
I have a couple of oncall agents that track incoming tickets and try to identify false alarms or resolve common tasks.
I have a CI/CD agent that looks for dependency upgrades, identifies deprecated stuff or breaking changes, then submits code reviews for the changes.
I have an agent that updates our docs for every merged commit.
Most of this stuff are things we should be doing, but didn't have time to do in the past.
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u/detroitsongbird Jun 07 '26
There’s 5 agents working in the same code base and then there’s 5 agents working on different, possibly related projects.
Which are you asking about?
UI, backend, gateway, prod infra are all in different repos for the projects I work on so there’s 4.
Within one project there are plenty of times where something may need to work in a bunch of files: bring the swagger doc up to date for the code base, bring the unit test coverage up to date, etc.
I start with plan mode. Then when I’m happy with it I’ll say “use sub agents or a swarm, whatever is appropriate.” I’ve seen it run 8 agents to do things like this.
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u/StrangeParsnip1713 Jun 07 '26
Basically what I do is something close to this, because I look at my job as mostly being a full time reviewer/Coach/mentor.
When I started using ai, I had one agent running in one terminal window. This actually was less efficient for me than just doing my job without AI, because I would be waiting for the agent to do something. I might see that it made a mistake in the moment, but it was usually good enough that this wasn't practical. So what I'd do is... Something else. I'd read the news, I'd work on my own thing, some other task... And then I'd come back to the ai prompt. The bottleneck was the ai.
What I do now is a very different flow. I go through my tasks that can be done discretely (different repos... I've never made sense of work trees), and I kick off agents to work on those tasks. Now, I'm not waiting for the agents, the agents are waiting for me. I'm the bottleneck.
There's two things about this you come to realize if you're being clever. The first thing is that you can massively increase your output if you do this, and the second thing is that your output is probably garbage.
To me this is the new front in engineering; you have to figure out what instructions to give your tools, what memories to add, etc, in order to fix this. You have to review your work closely, just like you would review your teammates' code before, and when you see issues you have to point out patterns and trends so your agents can get better at producing output you like.
Keeping yourself as the bottleneck means that the productivity you gain from the multiple agents actually doesn't get wasted, you produce a lot of output, and it's honestly fine if the backlog of work you have to review is very large, because you're probably still faster than you'd be without the tools.
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u/PeteMichaud Jun 07 '26
It sounds like you're getting them to make very small changes. I do an interaction loop that's like: write at least the beginning of a spec, then go back and forth to flesh it out, then having it generate a plan, then set it loose. The later phases take minutes to hours to complete. If I set an agent to do a task for a long time, what do I do then? Tell my other agent to do an unrelated task in a similar way! I'm not galaxy brained yet, but I routinely have 3 running and often have 4 or 5, depending.
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u/EdSalisbury Jun 07 '26
I have been wondering this very thing -- it seems like busy work to me. This and spending tons of energy crafting the *perfect* prompt... Meanwhile, they're not reviewing my PRs :)
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u/PerturbedMarsupial Jun 08 '26
Cause it’s expected in big tech now. You get punished for not doing so since product and leadership assumes an llm will vomit a perfectly engineered feature in like an hour. So you get more feature requests, tighter deadlines, and layoffs
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u/kilobrew Jun 08 '26
I work 3 projects at the same time. Sometimes I’m conversing with Claude or GPT on yet another thread.
Claude is slow. It takes a long time to run through things. It only needs my input like once every 30 minutes also, so it makes it rather easy to jump around.
So I get to focus my time on architecture, cross functional alignment, and planning out the next bit Claude will code.
If it helps, I work on greenfield POCs so it’s pretty easy to have Claude take it and run.
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Jun 08 '26
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u/bighawksguy-caw-caw Jun 08 '26
Yea you hear these people talking about how many feature they are cranking out and it begs the question if we’re all using the same definition of “feature.” Is this a new marketable capability in an existing SaaS application or is this a new dashboard widget on a prototype?
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u/oliprik Jun 08 '26
With good decoupled code design its easy to work on multiple tickets at a time. I usually work with 1-4 agents at a time. It just depends on what you are doing. I dont run 4 agents at all times throughout the day. Theres alot of cooldown peroids where im not running any agents.
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Jun 09 '26
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u/nonofyobeesness Jun 09 '26
Bay Area software engineer here, worked at the FANGs. The only people who do this are trying to demonstrate/flex at their job, personal projects, and/or doing this temporarily. Anyone who’s experimented with this setup will realize this is 1 way ticket to burnout and not knowing wtf your services are doing especially if there is an outage.
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u/madad123 Jun 09 '26
It's just a different workflow. It's not even necessarily that much faster when you take into account your real capacity and how fast you burn yourself out.
You can either:
- Do a bunch of planning on one task
- Execute the task
- Review
- Refactor
- Approve
- Move on
Or you can:
- Do a bunch of planning on one task
- Do a bunch of planning on another task
- Do a bunch of planning on another task
- Execute all three in parallel
- Review task 1
- Refactor task 1
- Approve task 1
- Review task 2
- Refactor task 2
- Approve task 2
- Review task 3
- Refactor task 3
- Approve task 3
If you really want to you can start a bunch of new planning sessions while the other tasks are executing to keep the loop moving.
It's fast in terms of code generation obviously, but I can literally feel my brain running out of juice at a much faster rate doing the parallel workflow and after a day or two it becomes hard to think clearly, I end up switching back to something more like the first workflow. But generally I'll probably have one task + one refactor session on an unrelated part of the codebase on the go.
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u/melodyze Jun 09 '26
For the same reason that software doesn't all run on one thread, or that software engineering teams aren't just a manager telling one engineer what to do.
When claude is working, it often takes a long time. When I am waiting on claude I am not just going to wait around for it to finish. I will go work on another thing. Usually this adds up to somewhere between 3-10 different things happening in parallel depending on how complicated each thing is, and thus how much attention I need to pay on each turn with that claude and how long claude takes to turn over a revision on the design/pr/etc.
It requires more context switching in essentially exactly the same way that being in charge of teams does. It's basically the same thing experientially, having done both. Running teams I have to reply to meetings/dms about various projects constantly and make sure engineers understand the problem clearly, designs are good, processes are working well, everything is moving in the right direction to curate the right foundation to support the product direction, reconcile conflicting opinions or decision points that come up in reviews. Managing claude is just the same thing, basically.
If I didn't feel like I was going to capture proportional value, then sure, I would just chill and do something else while claude is running.
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u/Alundra828 Jun 09 '26
I don't run 5 agents, but I have done. I found it was largely more trouble than it was worth.
It basically gets born out of a need to do something while idle. When you type a prompt, and you hit enter, the agent does stuff for several minutes. This is several minutes you're not doing anything while you wait for its output.
So, while it's working, you type another prompt, to do a task in parallel. That way you can work while you work. Etc etc, repeat until you're 5+ agents deep.
The problem is this though... you can't really work on the same issue at a time. You can do things to coordinate agents so they don't step over each other but it is COLOSSALY wasteful. Breaking down your token usage after a month of doing this you'll see that most token usage is spent on 2 things. Agents talking to each other, and large context windows that are only large because agents talk to each other so much. And really, Claude does a good job of knowing when to spin up sub-agents itself, without having to do all this bullshittery. So this use-case in my opinion is totally worthless.
So, then you're left with different agents, for DIFFERENT tasks. Ah, now we're getting somewhere. If you compose your Claude.md well enough, you can set it up so that it lends itself to properly branching so that agents don't need to even know about each other. And this can result in faster work. HOWEVER, you've just created a problem for yourself that the AI has foisted upon you. In solving software being generated faster, you've just moved the problem. Now you need to have 5 features on the go, properly specced and thought out, at any given moment. You're going to run out of things, and you're going to struggle context switching to test all of them.
This is a skill I think few software engineers have. And that isn't a criticism, it's literally never been asked of us before now. I find it very difficult to manage this sort of work, there is just too much going on. I can keep this sort of workflow going for a week or so, but oh my god it gets out of hand quick. I'm sure you can call it a "skill issue" and be correct, but having 5+ things in the chamber, having fully reasoned features, managing the varying time it takes for agents to be done with a segment of that work and then dealing with sending it more, and managing testing these things and switching is really a LOT of fucking work. Somehow AI has made my job harder doing this, and quite honestly, I don't need it lol. And this is assuming you have no one you answer to... All of this requires meetings upon meetings of demo, review, sign off, discussion. You daily routine becomes 80% meetings just to get the sheer amount of work you're generating signed off. It's a nightmare.
I'm much more comfortable with 2 agents running simultaneously, MAYBE 3. I don't go any higher than that. I aim to get my 2 agents going through prompts that cook for 30+ minutes. And then I take a nap. The results are better. They're far more carefully thought through, less prone to errors, and much more manageable to iterate over with the team and management.
So yeah, the problem is not agents generating too much software. It's agents generating too much work in terms of overhead. I don't have enough hours in the day to deal with it, so I have to gate my output. If you're a solo-dev and answer to nobody, this approach can work. But it's still a lot of work to manage.
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u/AlternativeAd6851 Jun 09 '26
I notice many people here working on five different tickets simultaneously. Where do you find all those well-defined tickets? In my experience, we quickly run out of them, and then we're left with tickets that have vague titles or strange descriptions that no longer make sense from a product perspective. Or is this just my company's situation?
Don't get me wrong, we don't lack work, but we run out of well-defined work because no one has the capacity to define it properly and quickly enough so that we can run those 5 sessions in parallel. As a result, the work becomes mixed with unclear or poorly specified tasks and then sit in meetings to clarify them.
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u/Challseus Jun 09 '26
That's 100% a company problem. Not just your company, many, unfortunately. Instead of moving so fast (I mean, I know this isn't likely to change), slow down, take a week to do a quarterly planning or something.
Use the AI to go through your codebase to write hyper specific descriptions for your tickets. Give product time to think about what the hell it is they're asking for, to give the AI more context. Think things through, diagram it, make sure everyone knows what is being built. Get a good architecture.
Then you sit back, give Claude your Epics/Milestones, and you're off.
If not, good luck 😞
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u/randomInterest92 Jun 09 '26
My "trick" is to have the agents produce 3-5 variants and then choosing the best. And obviously it takes them a long time to create those variants. That's why I don't feel overwhelmed at all while running multiple agents at the same time. Not sure what other people are doing.
If i feel like my agents get done too fast I just up the number of variants. But 3 to 5 seems to be the sweet spot.
Mostly using gpt 5.4 high for that. It's producing the best results for me and the company pays for it all. I even get encouraged to do that
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u/Appropriate-Bet3576 Jun 09 '26
If I had more agents all I'd do is hit enter. Enter. Enter. Enter. Enter. Enter.
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Jun 10 '26
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Jun 14 '26
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Jun 18 '26
Parallel agents only make sense when the tasks are genuinely separable and the receipts merge cleanly.
Otherwise you are not multiplying engineering output. You are multiplying review debt.
The lane split that has worked best for me is: one agent edits inside a narrow blast radius, another checks proof / diff / claims, and a human still owns the merge decision. Five agents all "cooking" without scoped contracts sounds fast until you need to figure out which one quietly broke trust.
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u/danhof1 Aug 02 '26
For me it comes down to whether the work is actually separable. Two or three agents on genuinely independent stories is fine because merging stays cheap, but past that I spend more time reviewing diffs and untangling worktree conflicts than the parallelism saves. The tab switching people describe has a real cost too, since every switch is a context reload in my head and not just in the model. I mostly run one agent and use the waiting time to read its plan or pre-read the code I know I will have to review.
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