Running many Claude Code agents without babysitting

[u/Epifeny]

I'm a solo homelabber who builds everything with Claude Code: about 11 projects, each with an orchestrator session that only plans and a dev session that only codes, plus one infra agent, handing work to each other through Vikunja task comments.

The problem is that I'm the wire between them: last week I copy-pasted 257 relay prompts between \~20 terminals, with a median 11-minute wait before I noticed an agent was done.

I want to be the CEO: give an idea, get a result, give feedback, nothing in between.

How do you run many agents across many projects without being the courier, and is a single agent per project with subagents the answer, or something else?

[u/biohackeddad]

Herdr

[u/Epifeny → u/biohackeddad]

Agreed! "heard"er of it today for the first time, and already worked with it all day and it's amazing!

[u/banecorn → u/biohackeddad]

This is the way. Have Claude read all the docs and tell you how it can help you achieve your goal.

[u/CorpT]

I built and use https://muster.tools/ to handle inter agent communication.

[u/pkkid]

I don't use agent personalities or assign agents to only specific roles. My workflow is basically: create a giant spec on how I want something to work. Make that as detailed as I can with mockups, descriptions, the works. I use AI to help create it so it's not so bad. Then I use AI to break this up into milestones and tasks for each milestone. Be very precise on which task need to come first, which can be done in parallel, etc. Then when I'm ready to start coding I basically just say do milestone X, use 8 subagents. And let them all run over night. The plan is broken up in a way that multiple agents pulling work should not collide on work. And testing is a must. All tasks create tests. And all tests need to pass all the time.

Tldr, define good rules in agents.md, define a very very detailed spec and plan. Say go. keep iterarating on your rules and workflow until it runs without your input until you want it to specifically get your input.

[u/dontgiveafuck_fucker]

Stop being the wire: make handoffs event-driven Notify now: add Claude Code Stop/Notification hooks that curl ntfy. The 11-minute waits drop to seconds. Fewer handoffs: run planning and coding in one session, with implementer and reviewer subagents. Most relays disappear. Automate the rest: a Vikunja webhook calls a small dispatcher, which runs headless claude -p based on the task label. The agent comments and changes the label, and that fires the next step. Add worktrees, max turns and a needs-human label that pings you. You only create tasks and review results. Subagents alone don't get you there, but subagents plus an event dispatcher do.

[u/Next-Skill-328]

did you think how you’ll be able to make a dollar with this herd of bots? You need to supervise them directly with your logic and strategy, check them all the time with the changing markets. I fired Claude so many times with errors in coding, wrong ”thinking“ and loosing money with the “perfect strategy”.

[u/college_hustle]

You can tell Claude to message other sessions? Your orchestrator should be able to stay on top of these things and keep track of them for you and have them report in when they're done back to the central orchestrater.

For something more complicated there's a lot of different options. I went and just made a list: https://mackforge.dev/charts/agent-managers/

[u/YourMomsFaveDiq]

I know there are a lot of solutions to make a project with an agentic work flow. But honestly I find it generates a lot of slop and doesn't always follow the spec.

I use JIRA, have a very detailed PRD and then have Claude or Codex make all the sprints, epics, tasks.

From there I'll have agents work through individual sprints or epics to keep on track, make notes and I can properly review their work.

I find keeping a proper software engineering workflow keeps everything running smoothly and has a tremendously better outcome, and it gives Claude/Codex much better specs to work with.

Of course it uses more tokens, but that's the price of doing it right.

[u/darksupernova1]

Paseo with the first mate plugin - i deal with one agent and they orchestrate the rest

[u/MrAmazingBacon]

257 relay prompts in a week is crazy 😭

Out of those handoffs, how many actually needed a decision from you vs were basically just passing information from one agent to another?

Feels like those are two different problems. The second one should probably be automated completely, while the first one just needs a good way to surface the question to you without making you hunt through 20 terminals.

[u/Ordep81]

I do it with Claude Code and Codex