Yeah I don’t understand these posts recently with people running 10 at once

Can someone give an example of what each of them would be doing?

Are they just really slow, is that the problem?

For me it's their speed, yes. I only run 0-3 at a time, and often the problem at hand is very much not complex. For example "Take this component out of the file into its own file, including its styles." The agent may take 5 minutes for that and what do I do in the meantime? I can start another agent for the next task at hand.

Could also be a bug hunt "Sometimes we get an error message about XYZ, please investigate how that might happen." or "Please move setting XY from localstorage to cookies".

I rarely run 10 top-level sessions, but I often run multiple.

Here is one case, though:

I have a prototype Ruby compiler that long languished because I didn't have time. I recently picked up work on it again with Claude Code.

There are literally thousands of unimplemented methods in the standard library. While that has not been my focus so far, my next step for it is to make Claude work on implementing missing methods in 10+ sessions in parallel, because why not? While there are some inter-dependencies (e.g. code that would at least be better with more of the methods of the lowest level core classes already in place), a huge proportion are mostly independent.

In this case the rubyspec test suite is there to verify compliance. On top of that I have my own tests (does the compiler still compile itself, and does the selftests still run when compiled with self-compiled compiler?) so having 10+ sessions "pick off" missing pieces, make an attempt see if it can make it pass, and move on, works well.

My main limitation is that I have already once run into the weekly limits of my (most expensive) Claude Max subscription, and I need it for other things too for client work and I'm not willing to pay-per-token for the API use for that project since it's not immediately giving me a return.

(And yes, they're "slow" - but faster than me; if they were fast enough, then sure, it'd be nicer to have them run serially, the same way if you had time it's easier to get cohesive work if a single developer does all the work on a project instead of having a team try to coordinate)

It just happens automatically. Once you set it running and it's chugging away there's nothing for you to do for a while. So of course you start working on something else. Then that is running ... before you know it, 5 of them are going and you have forgotten which is what and this is your new problem.

Yep.

For one of the things I am doing, I am the solo developer on a web application. At any given point, there are 4-5 large features I want and I instruct Claude to heavily test those features, so it is not unusual for each to run for 30-45 minutes and for overall conversations to span several hours. People are correct that it often makes mistakes, so that testing phase usually uncovers a bunch of issues it has to fix.

I usually have 1-2 mop up terminal windows open for small things I notice as I go along that I want to fix. Claude can be bad about things like putting white text on a white button and I want a free terminal to just drop every little nitpick into it. They exist for me to just throw small tasks into. Yes, you really should start a new convo every need, but these are small things and I do not want to disrupt my flow.

There are another 2-3 for smaller features that I am regularly reviewing and resetting. And then another one dedicated to just running the tests already built over and over again and solving any failures or investigating things. Another one is for research to tell me things about the codebase.