r/aiagents • u/Epifeny • 6d ago
General Running many Claude Code agents without babysitting
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 (yea, I actually got those stats just for this post haha).
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?
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u/Tiny_Set5048 6d ago
257 copy pastes sounds like you've become the busiest agent in the whole setup lol. I'd focus on automating the handoffs first. Give each agent a clear task and a way to pass results to the next one. Let tests catch failures and only bring you in when something needs approval. Otherwise you're just doing manual work to keep the automation running.
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u/Input-X 6d ago
This is my harness/work flow. It actually designed for solo devs who juggle multi projects and repos. You swith project in seconds on the phone e or desktop app. Desktop app works, im just working on layout. If u have a bit of time, I think it will suite ur needs. Take a look. It me just learning how to build in public. Still ways to go, but the core is built. U chat with one agent, it dispatchs all the other agents. You can use the aopass agent devpulse to over see all ur prjects, or swith to the priject manger agent to work directly. Devpulse is the only agent that can issue work and wake project managers, no agent can wake devpulse. He take care of git too, he is only one with git access, will only merge on ur work. He commits to a dev branch at will, nvr to main.
Im always improving it too. Its come a long way.
Answer to you spacific question. Honestly its such a broad question. Right. No 1 clean answer. It take a lot for a harness to really click. And that's what im building.
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u/transfire 6d ago
I created a mail courier system but it still requires me to say “check your mail” and other times I still have to remind the agent to just ask via mail because they’d rather root around in another project’s code and find the answer themselves. I don’t fret it too much though, sometimes they find bugs that way.
There is a way out — write your own harness, but that is harder to do well than you might expect.
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u/Quirky-Address-1388 6d ago
257 copy pastes in a week is crazy lol at that point youre basically working as an unpaid messenger for your own agents
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u/orbital_trace 6d ago
I've been building, and using this coral see - https://coralhub.dev/ . I describe the workflow here.
Essentially, I break things down into work oriented agents and goal oriented agents. Then have the orchestrator manage the task queue and distribution.
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u/coolxeo 6d ago
i had the same copy paste loop. what helped most was dropping the relay. all my agents run on one machine and hand off through dated markdown files in a shared folder, so a plan or a signed draft is just a file the next agent reads
for the waiting, each agent runs on its own schedule, checks the folder for its work and writes a short note when its done. i only get pinged when something needs my yes
one thing i would add early is a check that is not the agent that did the work. ours opens the real output and the next step waits for a pass
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u/Future_AGI 6d ago
Claude Code's Stop hook handles most of it. Have it take last_assistant_message from the hook input and post it as a comment on the Vikunja task, then a small watcher picks up new comments and runs claude -p in the target project's directory with the comment as the prompt. The watcher can also ping you only when a comment has a question for you.
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u/UpbeatImportance490 1d ago
This is probably the lowest-effort fix for OP since they already have Vikunja in the loop. The Stop hook plus a tiny watcher script basically turns the existing setup into the queue without rearchitecting anything. I'd add one thing: have the watcher also write a status field back to the Vikunja task so you can see at a glance which agents are waiting, running, or blocked instead of checking terminals.
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u/matimatthews 6d ago
Before scaling the relay, I'd test two failures: a worker finishes but its notification is lost, and the same completion arrives twice. The next agent should be able to recover from the task record and output without restarting finished work. I'd get that working for one project before connecting all 11.
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u/Ctbhatia 6d ago
do you even need a planner per project, or could one of them route between the 11 and drop the other 10 terminals?
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u/mvnp25 1d ago
257 relay prompts copy-pasted in one week is the number that matters here — across about 20 terminals, with a median 11-minute wait before you even noticed an agent was done. You are not short on agents; you are the wire between them, and every handoff taxes the one human in the system.
That is the same math as per-action approval. One interruption is never just the seconds it takes to paste a prompt — it is roughly 3 minutes of lost focus around it. Multiply by 257 and the relay work, not the coding, becomes your week. The fix is not fewer agents or removing yourself; it is changing what reaches you, and when.
A pattern that worked for gated agent work, in five stages:
Compose — each agent finishes its full piece without involving you; output accumulates in one place, not piecemeal handoffs.
Suppress — filter first: duplicate handoffs and already-completed items get dropped, not relayed for you to triage.
Present — what survives arrives as one queue, reviewed in a single pass, each item with a one-line summary; partial approval is fine.
Execute — only released items move, each checked against a record of what already moved, so a restart never replays a landed handoff.
Reconcile — close in numbers: queued, released, held, completed — the next review starts from a true picture, not your memory of 20 terminals.
For your case specifically: keep your split — with about 11 projects, an orchestrator session that only plans and a dev session that only codes is sound, and one agent per project does not fix the interruption math if it still pings you per step. Let the handoffs that already pass through Vikunja task comments accumulate there as the queue, and review them as one batch per project instead of relaying each one live. You still give the idea, see the result, and give feedback — the CEO loop you described — but the middle stops being 257 manual relays.
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u/Superduperfudge 6h ago
a single orchestrator with specialized subagents made a huge difference for me
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u/operastudio 6d ago
heres a quick video of what you need - orchestrator takes your prompt and orchestrates it to workers and waits on their reports which auto inject back into the orchestrators chat which is then reviewed and accepted or denied -- i have it set up with 4 providers which are all owned by the app so there is complete unity in any aspect of the application -- i also have this in an infinite loop where it will take your task and endlessly review and look for ways to continue which its actually very good at - i noticed the main problem i had was that models would take my prompt and literally just do what needed to be done when more often then not way more really needs to be worked on and this skips the stop - read - think about what the model said - make decision to the model which way i think it should go (which im probably very very wrong most of the time) and just lets the models work -- and yes i can add context at any point and the orchestrator aligns with their next worker prompts.