top | item 46902368

Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions

396 points| davidbarker | 25 days ago |code.claude.com

226 comments

order

mcintyre1994|24 days ago

I’ve been mostly holding off on learning any of the tools that do this because it seemed so obvious that it’ll be built natively. Will definitely give this a go at some point!

pronik|24 days ago

To the folks comparing this to GasTown: keep in mind that Steve Yegge explicitely pitched agent orchestrators to among others Anthropic months ago:

> I went to senior folks at companies like Temporal and Anthropic, telling them they should build an agent orchestrator, that Claude Code is just a building block, and it’s going to be all about AI workflows and “Kubernetes for agents”. I went up onstage at multiple events and described my vision for the orchestrator. I went everywhere, to everyone. (from "Welcome to Gas Town" https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...)

That Anthropic releases Agent Teams now (as rumored a couple of weeks back), after they've already adopted a tiny bit of beads in form of Tasks) means that either they've been building them already back when Steve pitched orchestrators or they've decided that he's been right and it's time to scale the agents. Or they've arrived at the same conclusions independently -- it won't matter in the larger scale of things. I think Steve greately appreciates it existing; if anything, this is a validation of his vision. We'll probably be herding polecats in a couple of months officially.

isoprophlex|24 days ago

There seems to be a lot of convergent evolution happening in the space. Days before the gas town hype hit, I made a (less baroque, less manic) "agent team" setup: a shell script to kick off a ralph wiggum loop, and CLAUDE-MESSAGE-BUS.md for inter-ralph communication (Thread safety was hacked into this with a .claude.lock file).

The main claude instance is instructed to launch as many ralph loops as it wants, in screen sessions. It is told to sleep for a certain amount of time to periodically keep track of their progress.

It worked reasonably well, but I don't prefer this way of working... yet. Right now I can't write spec (or meta-spec) files quick enough to saturate the agent loops, and I can't QA their output well enough... mostly a me thing, i guess?

bonesss|24 days ago

Compare both approaches to mature actor frameworks and they don’t seem to be breaking much ice. These kinds of supervisor trees and hierarchies aren’t new for actor based systems and they’re obvious applications of LLM agents working in concert.

The fact that Anthropic and OpenAI have been going on this long without such orchestration, considering the unavoidable issues of context windows and unreliable self-validation, without matching the basic system maturity you get from a default Akka installation shows us that these leading LLM providers (with more money, tokens, deals, access, and better employees than any of us), are learning in real time. Big chunks of the next gen hype machine wunder-agents are fully realizable with cron and basic actor based scripting. Deterministically, write once run forever, no subscription needed.

Kubernetes for agents is, speaking as a krappy kubernetes admin, not some leap, it’s how I’ve been wiring my local doom-coding agents together. I have a hypothesis that people at Google (who are pretty ok with kubernetes and maybe some LLM stuff), have been there for a minute too.

Good to see them building this out, excited to see whether LLM cluster failures multiply (like repeating bad photocopies), or nullify (“sorry Dave, but we’re not going to help build another Facebook, we’re not supposed to harm humanity and also PHP, so… no.”).

tyre|24 days ago

Sorry, are you saying that engineers at Anthropic who work on coding models every day hadn’t thought of multiple of them working together until someone else suggested it?

I remember having conversations about this when the first ChatGPT launched and I don’t work at an AI company.

yieldcrv|24 days ago

Why is Yegge so.... loud?

Like, who cares? Judging from his blog recount of this it doesn't seem like anybody actually does. He's an unnecessarily loud and enthused engineer inserting himself into AI conversations instead of just playing office politics to join the AI automation effort inside of a big corporation?

"wow he was yelling about agent orchestration in March 2025", I was about 5 months behind him, the company I was working for had its now seemingly obligatory "oh fuck, hackathon" back in August 2025

and we all came to the same conclusions. conferences had everyone having the same conclusion, I went to the local AWS Invent, all the panels from AWS employees and Developer Relations guys were about that

it stands to reason that any company working on foundational models and an agentic coding framework would also have talent thinking about that sooner than the rest of us

so why does Yegge want all of this attention and think its important at all, it seems like it would have been a waste of energy to bother with, like in advance everything should have been able to know that. "Anthropic! what are you doing! listen to meeeehhhh let me innnn!"

doesn't make sense, and gastown's branding is further unhinged goofiness

yeah I can't really play the attribution games on this one, can't really get behind who cares. I'm glad its available in a more benign format now

segmondy|24 days ago

This is nothing new, folks have been doing this for since 2023. Lots of paper on arxiv and lots of code in github with implementation of multiagents.

... the "limit" were agents were not as smart then, context window was much smaller and RLVR wasn't a thing so agents were trained for just function calling, but not agent calling/coordination.

we have been doing it since then, the difference really is that the models have gotten really smart and good to handle it.

aaaalone|24 days ago

Honestly this is one of plenty ideas I also have.

But this shows how much stuff is still to do in the ai space

GoatOfAplomb|24 days ago

I wonder if my $20/mo subscription will last 10 minutes.

mohsen1|24 days ago

At this point, if you're paying out of pocket you should use Kimi or GLM for it to make sense

tclancy|24 days ago

Ah ok, same. I keep wondering about how this would ever accomplish anything.

simlevesque|24 days ago

I've had good results with Haiku for certain tasks.

bluerooibos|24 days ago

This is great and all but, who can actually afford to let these agents run on tasks all day long? Is anyone here actually using this or are these rollouts aimed at large companies?

I'm burning through so many tokens on Cursor that I've had to upgrade to Ultra recently - and i'm convinced they're tweaking the burn rate behind the scenes - usage allowance doesn't seem proportional.

Thank god the open source/local LLM world isn't far behind.

anupamchugh|24 days ago

Real numbers from today. FastAPI codebase, ~50k LOC. 4 agents, 6 tasks, ~6 min wall clock vs ~18-20 min sequential. 24 tests, 0 file conflicts. Token cost: roughly 4x a single session.

To your cost question — agent teams are sprinters, not marathon runners. You use them for a 6-minute burst of parallel work, not all day. A 6-minute burst at 4x cost is still cheaper than 20 minutes at 1x if your time matters more than tokens.

The constraint nobody mentions: tasks must be file-disjoint. Two agents editing the same file means overwrites. Plan decomposition matters more than the agents themselves.

One thing to watch: Claude Code crashed mid-session with a React reconciler error (#23555). 4 agents + MCP servers pushes the UI past its limits.

MarkMarine|24 days ago

A Claude max 20x plan and you’ll be fine. I’d been doing my normal process of running 4 Claude sessions in parallel because that was about the right amount of concurrent sessions for me to watch what’s going on and approve/deny plans and code… and this blows it out of the water. With an agent swarm it’s so fast at executing and testing I’m limited by my idea and review capabilities now. I tried running 2 and I can’t keep up, I’m defining specs and the other window is done, tested, validated and waiting for me.

rahimnathwani|24 days ago

Many many companies can afford to hire a junior engineer for $150k/year (plus employer payroll taxes, employee benefits etc.).

Are you spending more than $150k per year on AI?

(Also, you're talking about the cost of your Cursor subscription, when the article is about Claude Code. Maybe try Claude Max instead?)

logicx24|24 days ago

I can't even get through my Claude Max quota, and that's only 200/mo. And I code every day and use it for various other pretty-intensive tasks.

emp17344|24 days ago

Especially for what’s basically an experiment. Gas town didn’t really work, so there’s no guarantee this will even produce anything of value.

reactordev|24 days ago

You know those VC funded startups with just two founders… them.

jwpapi|24 days ago

I mean what you get for Claude Code Max is insane its 30x on the token price. If you don’t spend that all it’s your own fault. That must be below elecricity cost

bhasi|24 days ago

Seems similar to Gas Town

rafram|24 days ago

I'm not anti-whimsy, but if your project goes too hard on the whimsy (and weird AI-generated animal art), it's kind of inevitable that someone else is going to create a whimsy-free clone, and their version will win because it's significantly less embarrassing to explain to normal people.

reissbaker|24 days ago

Where are the polecats, though? What about the mayor's dog?

koakuma-chan|24 days ago

I don't know what Gas Town is, but Claude Code Agent Teams is what I was doing for a while now. You use your main conversation only to spawn sub agents to plan and execute, allowing you to work for a long time without losing context or compacting, because all token-heavy work is done by sub agents in their own context. Claude Code Agent Teams just streamlines this workflow as far as I can tell.

nickorlow|24 days ago

yeah, seems like a much simpler design though (i.e. only seems like one 'special/leader' agent, and the rest are all workers vs gastown having something like 8 different roles mayor, polecat, witnesses, etc).

Wonder how they compare?

temuze|24 days ago

Yeah but worse

No polecats smh

ramesh31|24 days ago

>"Seems similar to Gas Town"

I love that we are in this world where the crazy mad scientists are out there showing the way that the rest of us will end up at, but ahead of time and a bit rough around the edges, because all of this is so new and unprecedented. Watching these wholly new abstractions be discovered and converged upon in real time is the most exciting thing I've seen in my career.

ottah|24 days ago

I absolutely cannot trust Claude code to independently work on large tasks. Maybe other people work on software that's not significantly complex, but for me to maintain code quality I need to guide more of the design process. Teams of agents just sounds like adding a lot more review and refactoring that can just be avoided by going slower and thinking carefully about the problem.

nickstinemates|24 days ago

You write a generic architecture document on how you want your code base to be organized, when to use pattern x vs pattern y, examples of what that looks like in your code base, and you encode this as a skill.

Then, in your prompt you tell it the task you want, then you say, supervise the implementation with a sub agent that follows the architecture skill. Evaluate any proposed changes.

There are people who maximize this, and this is how you get things like teams. You make agents for planning, design, qa, product, engineering, review, release management, etc. and you get them to operate and coordinate to produce an outcome.

That's what this is supposed to be, encoded as a feature instead of a best practice.

aqme28|24 days ago

I agree, but I've found that making an "adversarial" model within claude helps with the quality a lot. One agent makes the change, the other picks holes in it, and cycle. In the end, I'm left with less to review.

This sounds more like an automation of that idea than just N-times the work.

stpedgwdgfhgdd|24 days ago

Exactly, one out of four or three prompts require tuning, nudging or just stopping it. However it takes seniority to see where it goes astray. I suspect that lots of folks dont even notice that CC is off. It works, it passes the tests, so it is good.

turtlebits|24 days ago

Humans can't handle large tasks either, which is why you break them into manageable chunks.

Just ask claude to write a plan and review/edit it yourself. Add success criteria/tests for better results.

BonoboIO|24 days ago

You definitely have to create some sort of PLAN.md and PROGRESS.md via a command and an implement command that delegates work. That is the only way that I can get bigger things done no matter how „good“ their task feature is.

You run out of context so quickly and if you don’t have some kind of persistent guidance things go south

nprz|24 days ago

There is research[0] currently being done on how to divide tasks and combine the answers to LLMs. This approach allows LLMs reach outcomes (solving a problem that requires 1 million steps) which would be impossible otherwise.

[0]https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09030

findjashua|24 days ago

you need a reviewer agent for every step of the process - review the plan generated by the planner, the update made by the task worker subagent, and a final reviewer once all tasks are done.

this does eat up tokens _very_ quickly though :(

Sol-|24 days ago

With stuff like this, might be that all the infra build-out is insufficient. Inference demand will go up like crazy.

RGamma|24 days ago

Unlocking the next order of magnitude of software inefficiency!

Though I do hope the generated code will end up being better than what we have right now. It mustn't get much worse. Can't afford all that RAM.

kylehotchkiss|24 days ago

It'd be nice if CC could figure out all the required permissions upfront and then let you queue the job to run overnight

Der_Einzige|24 days ago

Anyone paying attention has known that demand for all type of compute than can run LLMs (i.e. GPUs, TPUs, hell even CPUs) was about to blow up, and will remain extremely large for years to come.

It's just HN that's full of "I hate AI" or wrong contrarian types who refuse to acknowledge this. They will fail to reap what they didn't sow and will starve in this brave new world.

nkmnz|24 days ago

I’m looking for something like this, with opus in the driver seat, but the subagents should be using different LLMs, such as Gemini or Codex. Anyone know if such a tool? just-every/code almost does this, but the lead/orchestrator is always codex, which feels too slow compared to opus or Gemini.

eaf7e281|24 days ago

These two basically do what you want, let Claude be the manager and Codex/Gemini be the worker. Many say that Coder-Codex-Gemini is easier to understand than CCG-Workflow, which has too many commands to start with.

https://github.com/FredericMN/Coder-Codex-Gemini https://github.com/fengshao1227/ccg-workflow

This one also seems promising, but I haven't tried it yet.

https://github.com/bfly123/claude_code_bridge

All of them are made by Chinese dev. I know some people are hesitant when they see Chinese products, so I'll address that first. But I have tried all of them, and they have all been great.

fosterfriends|24 days ago

I think this is where future cursor features will be great - to coordinate across many different model providers depending on the sub-jobs to be done

knes|24 days ago

At Augment' we've been working on this. Multi agents orchestration, spec driven, different models for different tasks, etc.

https://www.augmentcode.com/product/intent

can use the code AUGGIE to skip the queue. Bring your own agent (powered by codex, CC, etc) coming to it next week.

sathish316|24 days ago

You can run an ensemble of LLMs (Opus, Gemini, Codex) in Claude Code Router via OpenRouter or any Agent CLI that supports Subagents and not tied to a single LLM like Opencode. I have an example of this in Pied-Piper, a subagent orchestrator that runs in Claude Code or ClaudeCodeRouter and uses distinct model/roles for each Subagent:

1. GPT-5.2 Codex Max for planning

2. Opus 4.5 for implementation

3. Gemini for reviews

It’s easy to swap models or change responsibilities. Doc and steps here: https://github.com/sathish316/pied-piper/blob/main/docs/play...

d4rkp4ttern|24 days ago

This sounds very promising. Using multiple CC instances (or mix of CLI-agents) across tmux panes has always been a workflow of mine, where agents can use the tmux-cli [1] skill/tool to delegate/collaborate with others, or review/debug/validate each others work.

This new orchestration feature makes it much more useful since they share a common task list and the main agent coordinates across them.

[1] https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools?tab=readme-o...

vardalab|24 days ago

Yeah, I've been using your tools for a while. They've been nice.

giancarlostoro|24 days ago

I was working on my own alternative to Beads... then I realized I could do exactly this with something similar to Beads, I'm planning on open sourcing it soon because I like what I have so far, I also made it so I can sync my tasks directly to my GitHub projects as well. I think its more useful to have agent tasks eventually synched back up to real ticketing systems for historical reasons. Besides, its better to have alternatives that are agent agnostic.

asdev|24 days ago

I personally have no use for this type of workflow. I like parallel claude code instances in worktrees but nothing beyond that

hpdigidrifter|24 days ago

Am not a fan of dealing with worktrees Maybe for larger longer lived tasks but the time spent on merges from different agents is definitely a big headwind for parallel work.

This seems handled by this new agent which is cool.

I gave up on worktrees and hacked together a solution with fine-grained lockfiles for editing, running builds, etc that worked surprisingly good for what it was

jFriedensreich|24 days ago

While i appreciate anthropic making a proof of concept like they did with claude code cli on which they can then do RL to optimise the patterns that work, I expect this to be as unusable as the cli itself. Its a big difference if a model provider internalises something like thinking mode which mainly depends on context and text or if they try to grab a part of the agent loop which has to run on the side of the systems we build and use.

We cannot allow model providers to own the browsers, CLIs, memory, IDEs, extensions and other tooling. Its not just a matter of power but also they just suck at it as i experience every time i have to use claude code instead of amp.

I truly hope we get the pattern of innovation that looks like:

- some dude vibecodes a really cool idea

- model providers build into their reference implementations

- model providers optimize models to work optimally

- startup and/or open source projects step in and build something that is actually usable and opens a new market segment

We saw this play out beautifully with amp, kilo, roo, cline, continue

Another aspect is that we do not want interfaces just made for agents to work in teams, we want software made for humans and agents, that are true platforms for these agent teams to collaborate in.

dangus|24 days ago

A cynical read of this is that it’s all a ploy to maximize usage.

Why do agents need to speak to each other if they’re just doing the work correctly the first time?

Is it an admission that a single agent is not useful and reliable enough?

WXLCKNO|24 days ago

I run a loop where I have 4 agents review in parallel after each implementation phase. It just increases the odds of finding issues.

I've switched this over to a team of 4 now that talk to each other to discuss issues they find and it's amazing. They confirm between themselves and if they wrongly identified something the others correct them.

khaliqgant|24 days ago

Been waiting for this to drop and excited to test it out. We've been building something in this space - https://github.com/AgentWorkforce/relay, a real-time messaging layer that lets AI coding agents talk to each other across any CLI.

Assign roles to different models and have them coordinate: Claude as the lead, Codex on backend, Gemini on frontend, etc.

I wrote about my experiences with multi-agent orchestration here: https://x.com/khaliqgant/status/2019124627860050109?s=46

imiric|24 days ago

I find it amusing that the innovation in this space for the past year+ has been mostly centered around engineering: MCP, "agents", "skills", etc. Now "agent" orchestration is the new hotness.

Meanwhile, the same issues that have plagued these tools since their inception are largely ignored: hallucination, innacuracy, context collapse, etc. These won't be solved by engineering, but by new research and foundational improvements.

On one hand, solid engineering was sorely needed, and can extract a lot of value from the current tech. But on the other, all these announcements and improvements feel like companies grasping at straws to keep the hype cycle going by any means necessary. Charts must go up and to the right, or investors get antsy.

It's all adding to the mountain of signs that suggest that this isn't the path to artificial intelligence. It's interesting tech, with possibly many valuable applications, but the "AI" narrative is frankly tiring. I wish I could fast forward on this speculative phase, go past the inevitable crash, and arrive at a timeframe where we've figured out what this tech is actually good for, and where we hopefully use it more for good than evil.

rektlessness|24 days ago

Are people using Claude max 20x plan for personal pet projects? Are these expensed? Have you liquidated all other hobbies to fund this? Asking for a friend.

ndesaulniers|24 days ago

Subagents are out, put it all on agent teams!

greenfish6|24 days ago

something i really like from tryin git out over the last 10 minutes is that the main agent will continue talking to you while other agents are working, so you don't have to queue a message

greenfish6|24 days ago

Excited to try this out. I've seen a lot of working systems on my own computer that share files to talk between different Claude Code agents and I think this could work similarly to that.

(i thought gas town was satire? people in comments here seem to be saying that gas town also had multi-agent file sharing for work tracking)

morleytj|24 days ago

Gas Town decimated by Claude bomb from orbit

avereveard|24 days ago

"finish Claude tokens quota in 3 minutes, largely over delegation and result messages instead of code writing"

IhateAI|24 days ago

[deleted]

tjr|24 days ago

People often compare working with AI agents to being something like a project manager.

I've been a project manager for years. I still work on some code myself, but most of it is done by the rest of the team.

On one hand, I have more bandwidth to think about how the overall application is serving the users, how the various pieces of the application fit together, overall consistency, etc. I think this is a useful role.

On the other hand, I definitely have felt mental atrophy from not working in the code. I still think; I still do things and write things and make decisions. But I feel mentally out of shape; I lack a certain sharpness that I perceived when I was more directly in tune with the code.

And I'm talking, all orthogonal to AI. This is just me as a project manager with other humans on the project.

I think there is truth to, well, operate at a higher level! Be more systems-minded, architecture-minded, etc. I think that's true. And there are surely interesting new problems to solve if we can work not on the level of writing programs, but wielding tools that write programs for us.

But I think there's also truth to the risk of losing something by giving up coding. Whether if that which might be lost is important to you or not, is your own decision, but I think the risk is real.

ramesh31|24 days ago

>I'd bet anything these new models / agentic-tools are designed to optimize for token consumption.

You would think, but Claude Code has gotten incredibly more efficient over time. They are doing so much dogfooding with these things at this point that it makes more sense to optimize.

M4R5H4LL|24 days ago

From an economic standpoint this is basically machines doing work humans used to do. We’ve already gone through this many times. We built machines that can make stuff orders of magnitude faster than humans, and nobody really argues we should preserve obsolete tools and techniques as a valued human craft. Obviously automation messes with jobs and identity for some people, but historically a large chunk of human labor just gets automated as the tech gets better. So I feel that arguing about whether automation is good or bad in the abstract is a bit beside the point. The more interesting question imho is how people and companies adapt to it, because it’s probably going to happen either way.

azan_|24 days ago

Of course it's to save businesses money (and not to empower programmers)! Software engineers for years automated jobs of other people, but when it's SEs that are getting automated, suddenly progress becomes bad?

theappsecguy|24 days ago

The crash and burn can't come soon enough.

aaaalone|24 days ago

When I use Google maps, I learn faster.

And I haven't to solve real hard problems for ages.

Some people will have problems some will not.

Future will tell.

ottah|24 days ago

Honestly my job is to ensure code quality and to protect the customer. I love working with claude code, it makes my life easier, but in no way would a team of agents improve code quality or speed up development. I would spend far too much time reviewing and fixing laziness and bad design decisions.

When you hear execs talking about AI, it's like listening to someone talk about how they bought some magic beans that will solve all their problems. IMO the only thing we have managed to do is spend alot more money on accelerated compute.

fooker|24 days ago

It would be tragically ironic if this post is AI generated.

wantlotsofcurry|24 days ago

I agree on all parts. I do not understand why anyone in the software industry would bend over backwards to show their work is worth less now.

markab21|24 days ago

Shaking fist at clouds!!

spelunker|24 days ago

How Butlerian of you.

cstrahan|24 days ago

> Any self respecting engineer should recognize that these tools and models only serve to lower the value of your labor.

Depends on what the aim of your labor is. Is it typing on a keyboard, memorizing (or looking up) whether that function was verb_noun() or noun_verb(), etc? Then, yeah, these tools will lower your value. If your aim is to get things done, and generate value, then no, I don't think these tools will lower your value.

This isn't all that different from CNC machining. A CNC machinist can generate a whole lot more value than someone manually jogging X/Y/Z axes on an old manual mill. If you absolutely love spinning handwheels, then it sucks to be you. CNC definitely didn't lower the value of my brother's labor -- there's no way he'd be able to manually machine enough of his product (https://www.trtvault.com/) to support himself and his family.

> Using these things will fry your brain's ability to think through hard solutions.

CNC hasn't made machinists forget about basic principles, like when to use conventional vs climb milling, speeds and feeds, or whatever. Same thing with AI. Same thing with induction cooktops. Same thing with any tool. Lazy, incompetent people will do lazy, incompetent things with whatever they are given. Yes, an idiot with a power tool is dangerous, as that tool magnifies and accelerates the messes they were already destined to make. But that doesn't make power tools intrinsically bad.

> Do you want your competency to be correlated 1:1 to the quality and quantity of tokens you can afford (or be loaned!!)?

We are already dependent on electricity. If the power goes out, we work around that as best as we can. If you can't run your power tool, but you absolutely need to make progress on whatever it is you're working on, then you pick up a hand tool. If you're using AI and it stops working for whatever reason, you simply continue without it.

I really dislike this anti-AI rhetoric. Not because I want to advocate for AI, but because it distracts from the real issue: if your work is crap, that's on you. Blaming a category of tool as inherently bad (with guaranteed bad results) suggests that there are tools that are inherently good (with guaranteed good results). No. That's absolutely incorrect. It is people who fall on the spectrum of mediocrity-to-greatness, and the tools merely help or hinder them. If someone uses AI and generates a bunch of slop, the focus should be on that person's ineptitude and/or poor judgement.

We'd all be a lot better off if we held each other to higher standards, rather than complaining about tools as a way to signal superiority.