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Parallel coding agents with tmux and Markdown specs

100 points by schipperai

by gas9S9zw3P9c

13 subcomments

I'd love to see what is being achieved by these massive parallel agent approaches. If it's so much more productive, where is all the great software that's being built with it? What is the OP building?
Most of what I'm seeing is AI influencers promoting their shovels.

by jasonjmcghee

0 subcomment

by ramoz

1 subcomments

by servercobra

1 subcomments

This is a really cool design, pretty similar to what I've built for implementation planning. I like how iterative it is and that the whole system lives just in markdown. The verify step is a great idea I hadn't made a command yet, thank you!
This seems like it'd be great for solo projects but starts to fall apart for a team with a lot more PRs and distributed state. Heck, I run almost everything in a worktree, so even there the state is distributed. Maybe moving some of the state/plans/etc to Linear et al solves that though.

by CloakHQ

3 subcomments

We ran something similar for a browser automation project - multiple agents working on different modules in parallel with shared markdown specs. The bottleneck wasn't the agents, it was keeping their context from drifting. Each tmux pane has its own session state, so you end up with agents that "know" different versions of reality by the second hour.
The spec file helps, but we found we also needed a short shared "ground truth" file the agents could read before taking any action - basically a live snapshot of what's actually done vs what the spec says. Without it, two agents would sometimes solve the same problem in incompatible ways.
Has anyone found a clean way to sync context across parallel sessions without just dumping everything into one massive file?

by aceelric

1 subcomments

I’ve been experimenting with a similar pattern but wrapping it in a “factory mode” abstraction (we’re building this at CAS[1]) where you define the spec once after careful planning using a supervisor agent then you let it go and spin up parallel workers against it automatically. It handles task decomposition + orchestration so you’re not manually juggling tmux panes
[1] https://cas.dev

by sluongng

2 subcomments

Yeah the 8 agents limit aligns well with my conversations with folks in the leading labs
https://open.substack.com/pub/sluongng/p/stages-of-coding-ag...
I think we need much different toolings to go beyond 1 human - 10 agents ratio. And much much different tooling to achieve a higher ratio than that

by nferraz

1 subcomments

by zwilderrr

1 subcomments

I just can’t get over the fact that your Anglicized name sounds like manual shipper.

by hinkley

3 subcomments

by kledru

1 subcomments

by philipp-gayret

1 subcomments

Is there a place where people like you go to share ideas around these new ways of working, other than HN? I'm very curious how these new ways of working will develop. In my system, I use voice memo's to capture thoughts and they become more or less what you have as feature designs. I notice I have a lot of ideas throughout the day (Claude chews through them some time later, and when they are worked out I review its plans in Notion; I use Notion because I can upload memos into it from my phone so it's more or less what you call the index). But ideas.. I can only capture them as they come, otherwise they are lost & I don't want to spend time typing them out.

by aplomb1026

0 subcomment

by mrorigo

0 subcomment