by vidarh | 2026-01-07 08:26:01+00:00
> I don't understand how you can generate requirements quicky enough to have 10 parallel agents chewing away at meaningful work.

You use agents to expand the requirements as well, either in plan mode (as OP does) or with a custom scaffold (rules in CLAUDE.md about how to handle requirements; personally I prefer giving Claude the latitude to start when Claude is ready rather than wait for my go-ahead)

> I don't understand how you can have any meaningful supervising role over 10 things at once given the limits of human working memory.

[this got long: TL;DR: This is what works for me: Stop worrying about individual steps; use sub-agents and slash-commands to encapsulate units of work to make Claude run longer; use permissions to allow as much as you dare (and/or run in a VM to allow Claude to run longer; give Claude tools to verify its work (linters, test suites, sub-agents double-checking the work against the spec) and make it use it; don't sit and wait and read invidiual parts of the conversation - it will only infuriate you to see Claude make stupid mistakes, but if well scaffolded it will fix them before it returns the code to you, so stop reading, breathe, and let it work; only verify when Claude has worked for a long time and checked its own work -- that way you review far less code and far more complete and coherent changes]

You don't. You wait until each agent is done, and you review the PR's. To make this kind of thing work well you need agents and slash-commands, like OP does - sub-agents in particular help prevent the top-level agents from "context anxiety": Claude Code appears to have knowledge of context use, and will be prone to stopping before context runs out; sub-agents use their own context and the top-level agent only uses context to manage the input to and output from them, so the more is farmed out to sub-agents, the longer Claude Code is willing to run. I when I got up this morning, Claude Code had run all night and produced about 110k words of output.

This also requires extensive permissions to use safe tools without asking (what OP does), or --dangerously-skip-permissions (I usually do this; you might want to put this in a container/VM as it will happily do things like "killall -9 python" or similar without "thinking through" consequences - I've had it kill the terminal it itself ran in before), or it'll stop far too quickly.

You'll also want to explicitly tell it to do things in parallel when possible. E.g. if you want to use it as a "smarter linter" (DO NOT rely on it as the only linter, use a regular one too, but using claude to apply more complex rules that requires some reasoning works great), you can ask it to "run the linter agent in parallel on all typescript files" for example, and it will tend to spawn multiple sub-agents running in parallel, and metaphorically twiddle its thumbs waiting for them to finish (it's fun seeing it get "bored" and decide to do other things in the meantime, or get impatient and check on progress obsessively).

You'll also want to make Claude use sub-agents to review, verify, test its work, with instructions to repeat until all the verification sub-agents give its changes a PASS (see 12/ and 13/ in the thread) - there is no reason for you to waste your time reviewing code that Claude itself can tell isn't ready.

[E.g. concrete example: "Vanilla" Claude "loves" using instance_variable_get() in Ruby if facing a class that is missing an accessor for an instance variable. Whether you know Ruby or not, that should stand out like a sore thumb - it's a horrifically gross code smell, as it's basically bypassing encapsulation entirely. But you shouldn't worry about that - if you write Ruby with Claude, you'd want a rule in CLAUDE.md telling it how to address missing accessors, and sub-agent, and possibly a hook, making sure that Claude is told to fix it immediately if it ever uses it.]

Farming it off to sub-agents both makes it willing to work longer, especially on "boring" tasks, and avoids the problem that it'll look at past work and decide it already "knows" this code is ready and start skipping steps.

The key thing is to stop obsessing over every step Claude takes, and treat that as a developer experimenting with something they're not clear on how to do yet. If you let it work, and its instructions are good, and it has ways of checking its work, it will figure out its first attempts are broken, fix them, and leave you with output that takes far less of your time to review.

When Claude tells you its done with a change, if you stop egregious problems, fix your CLAUDE.md, fix your planning steps, fix your agents.

None of the above will absolve you of reviewing code, and you will need to kick things back and have it fix them, and sometimes that will be tedious, but Claude is good enough that the problems you have it fix should be complex, not simple code smells or logic errors, and 9 out 10 times they should signal that your scaffold is lacking important detail about your project or that your spec is incomplete at a functional/acceptance criteria level (not low level detail)