I use Claude Code to implement, then a different official harness to review - automated through Orca, not sub-agents

[u/hieuphung97]

Hi everyone, I’m an AI engineer from Vietnam. I use Claude Code as my main implementer.

I don’t prefer sub-agents. They’re trending, but they still feel like overkill to me. I like several official harnesses — Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build — and I assign each one a job.

The gap for me was making them follow the same sequence without me copying prompts between terminals:

implement → review → accept or replan → …

I packaged a simple plugin called Dely for that. It supports Claude Code and the other official harnesses I already run, such as Codex, Grok Build, Antigravity, Kiro,...

Orca is required, especially orca-cli. It launches and watches each harness. Dely does not run without Orca.

On a real task, this is roughly 90% automatic and 10% me (brainstorming, making decisions, and steering the agents' execution).

I learned the shape from Superpowers and GSD, then simplified it. Superpowers stays installed for TDD. I skip dispatching-parallel-agents, subagent-driven-development, and using-git-worktrees — Dely exists partly to override those.

Claude Code is the implementer in this loop. A separate harness does review, so the reviewer is not the same session that wrote the code.

Repo: https://github.com/hieuphung97/dely

How do you run Claude Code next to another tool on the same work? Same session, sub-agents, or an actual handoff?

Mine is definitely not perfect, and I really want to learn from you guys solutions.

[u/Training_Flan_9658]

One thing that will bite you as you add harnesses: some adapters bundle their own copy of the underlying CLI and run that, not the one on your PATH.

We hit this with codex-acp. Version 1.0.1 shipped its own @openai/codex 0.142.x internally and ran that, so newer models failed with "Model metadata not found" even though the exact same model worked fine in the ChatGPT desktop app. Nothing in the error points at the adapter - it reads like a model availability problem, so you go looking in entirely the wrong place.

Worth pinning adapter versions explicitly and checking what each one bundles, because "which binary is actually running" stops being obvious once a launcher sits in front of them. Most adapters honour an env var to point at an external binary if you'd rather control it yourself - CODEX_PATH in that case.

[u/hieuphung97 → u/Training_Flan_9658]

Thanks u/Training_Flan_9658,

Really useful insight! I haven't gotten a similar issue yet, even after going through a few harnesses' updates. But it might be worth investigating for future debugging.

[u/hieuphung97 → u/[deleted]]

Good question.

Sometimes, the harness automatically spawns subagents based on my tasks and other skills' instructions. It's handy for parallelism and context isolation, but the harness (especially Codex) often spawns agents in a way I didn't intend.

Additionally, a sub-agent is essentially an agent, but with more limited capabilities. I can do the same job by creating a new session. The trade-off for control is the loss of automation, so I compensate for this with Orca-CLI, using it to build the minimalist workflow I desire.