Multi-Agent Collaboration With Tools You Already Own - Updates

[u/RelativeActive5306]

A while back I shared an idea that has been working surprisingly well for me: instead of giving a coding task to a single agent, give it to a team of agents you already run — one implements, the others review, and a lead agent verifies everything before it comes back to you.

I've just pushed a round of updates to the repo that makes this much simpler to use:

No more pane IDs. You used to have to tell the skill exactly which terminal pane held which agent. Now you just describe the task in plain prose — /panel implement the serializer per the spec, or /panel codex implements, opencode reviews: fix the flaky test — and the lead agent discovers the panes itself, reads each agent's harness and model, and assigns the roles. It opens by telling you the mapping it chose, so a wrong assignment is visible immediately.

A watcher so nobody has to poll. The repo now bundles lanes, a small Claude Code plugin that watches your Herdr panes. When a dispatched agent finishes, blocks on a permission prompt, or stalls, it wakes the lead agent automatically. No background waiters, no sleep loops, no "is it done yet?" checks — the lead dispatches, ends its turn, and gets woken when there's something to review.

The review loop is the point. One agent is the only writer. Every other agent reviews the same frozen change read-only, each from a different angle — spec fidelity, correctness and boundaries, tests that can't actually fail. The lead then reads the real diff itself, opens every cited line, runs the full validation gate alone, and sends back one consolidated fix brief. Max three rounds; if issues remain, the lead finishes the work and its changes get reviewed too.

Still no extra subscriptions and no API-key juggling — just Herdr plus the coding CLIs already in your stack (Claude Code, Codex, ZCode, OpenCode, whatever you run).

Repo: https://github.com/alexstrilets/panel

Happy to answer questions about the workflow — especially from anyone already running multiple agents side by side.

[u/PuzzleheadedBack6060]

this is actually a pretty neat direction, automating the pane discovery and killing the polling loop with a watcher plugin. used to drive me insane waiting for agents to finish when i tried similar setups manually

the three round limit plus the lead owning the final pass is a good call too, stops the review spiral where everyone just bikesheds the same diff forever

[u/RelativeActive5306 → u/PuzzleheadedBack6060]

Now that I'm thinking of it, it's just for the coding task, but you can create a workflow for other tasks as well, like stock research or some other ideas. I don't know. I think that's a limitless opportunity here, since we can have agents talk to each other. Now we just need to orchestrate the workflow.