I'd love to see what is being achieved by these massive parallel agent approaches. If it's so much more productive, where is all the great software that's being built with it? What is the OP building?
Most of what I'm seeing is AI influencers promoting their shovels.
It's for personal use, and I wouldn't call it great software, but I used Claude Code Teams in parallel to create a Fluxbox-compatible window compositor for Wayland [1].
Overall effort was a few days of agentic vibe-coding over a period of about 3 weeks. Would have been faster, but the parallel agents burn though tokens extremely quickly and hit Max plan limits in under an hour.
In my view, these agent teams have really only become mainstream in the last ~3 weeks since Claude Code released them. Before that they were out there but were much more niche, like in Factory or Ralphie Wiggum.
There is a component to this that keeps a lot of the software being built with these tools underground: There are a lot of very vocal people who are quick with downvotes and criticisms about things that have been built with the AI tooling, which wouldn't have been applied to the same result (or even poorer result) if generated by human.
This is largely why I haven't released one of the tools I've built for internal use: an easy status dashboard for operations people.
Things I've done with agent teams: Added a first-class ZFS backend to ganeti, rebuilt our "icebreaker" app that we use internally (largely to add special effects and make it more fun), built a "filesystem swiss army knife" for Ansible, converted a Lambda function that does image manipulation and watermarking from Pillow to pyvips, also had it build versions of it in go, rust, and zig for comparison sake, build tooling for regenerating our cache of watermarked images using new branding, have it connect to a pair of MS SQL test servers and identify why logshipping was broken between them, build an Ansible playbook to deploy a new AWS account, make a web app that does a simple video poker app (demo to show the local users group, someone there was asking how to get started with AI), having it brainstorm and build 3 versions of a crossword-themed daily puzzle (just to see what it'd come up with, my wife and I are enjoying TiledWords and I wanted to see what AI would come up with).
Those are the most memorable things I've used the agent teams to build in the last 3 weeks. Many of those things are internal tools or just toys, as another reply said. Some of those are publicly released or in progress for release. Most of these are in addition to my normal work, rather than as a part of it.
I work for Snowflake and the code I'm building is internal. I'm exploring open sourcing my main project which I built with this system. I'd love to share it one day!
The long tail of deployable software always strikes at some point, and monetization is not the first thing I think of when I look at my personal backlog.
I also am a tmux+claude enjoyer, highly recommended.
There are dozens and dozens of these submitted to Show HN, though increasingly without the title prefix now. This one doesn't seem any more interesting than the others.
I picked up a number things from others sharing their setup. While I agree some aspects of these are repetitive (like using md files for planning), I do find useful things here and there.
We ran something similar for a browser automation project - multiple agents working on different modules in parallel with shared markdown specs. The bottleneck wasn't the agents, it was keeping their context from drifting. Each tmux pane has its own session state, so you end up with agents that "know" different versions of reality by the second hour.
The spec file helps, but we found we also needed a short shared "ground truth" file the agents could read before taking any action - basically a live snapshot of what's actually done vs what the spec says. Without it, two agents would sometimes solve the same problem in incompatible ways.
Has anyone found a clean way to sync context across parallel sessions without just dumping everything into one massive file?
Most of what I'm seeing is AI influencers promoting their shovels.
Overall effort was a few days of agentic vibe-coding over a period of about 3 weeks. Would have been faster, but the parallel agents burn though tokens extremely quickly and hit Max plan limits in under an hour.
1. https://github.com/ecliptik/fluxland
There is a component to this that keeps a lot of the software being built with these tools underground: There are a lot of very vocal people who are quick with downvotes and criticisms about things that have been built with the AI tooling, which wouldn't have been applied to the same result (or even poorer result) if generated by human.
This is largely why I haven't released one of the tools I've built for internal use: an easy status dashboard for operations people.
Things I've done with agent teams: Added a first-class ZFS backend to ganeti, rebuilt our "icebreaker" app that we use internally (largely to add special effects and make it more fun), built a "filesystem swiss army knife" for Ansible, converted a Lambda function that does image manipulation and watermarking from Pillow to pyvips, also had it build versions of it in go, rust, and zig for comparison sake, build tooling for regenerating our cache of watermarked images using new branding, have it connect to a pair of MS SQL test servers and identify why logshipping was broken between them, build an Ansible playbook to deploy a new AWS account, make a web app that does a simple video poker app (demo to show the local users group, someone there was asking how to get started with AI), having it brainstorm and build 3 versions of a crossword-themed daily puzzle (just to see what it'd come up with, my wife and I are enjoying TiledWords and I wanted to see what AI would come up with).
Those are the most memorable things I've used the agent teams to build in the last 3 weeks. Many of those things are internal tools or just toys, as another reply said. Some of those are publicly released or in progress for release. Most of these are in addition to my normal work, rather than as a part of it.
The long tail of deployable software always strikes at some point, and monetization is not the first thing I think of when I look at my personal backlog.
I also am a tmux+claude enjoyer, highly recommended.
I actually had a manager once who would say Done-Done-Done. He’s clearly seen some shit too.
The spec file helps, but we found we also needed a short shared "ground truth" file the agents could read before taking any action - basically a live snapshot of what's actually done vs what the spec says. Without it, two agents would sometimes solve the same problem in incompatible ways.
Has anyone found a clean way to sync context across parallel sessions without just dumping everything into one massive file?
https://open.substack.com/pub/sluongng/p/stages-of-coding-ag...
I think we need much different toolings to go beyond 1 human - 10 agents ratio. And much much different tooling to achieve a higher ratio than that