Parallel coding agents with tmux and Markdown specs

CloakHQ 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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?

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hinkley a minute ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[delayed]

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sluongng 4 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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gas9S9zw3P9c an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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ecliptik 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It's for personal use, and I wouldn't call it great software, but I used Claude Code Teams in parallel to create a Fluxbox-compatible window compositor for Wayland [1].

Overall effort was a few days of agentic vibe-coding over a period of about 3 weeks. Would have been faster, but the parallel agents burn though tokens extremely quickly and hit Max plan limits in under an hour.

1. https://github.com/ecliptik/fluxland

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schipperai 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I work for Snowflake and the code I'm building is internal. I'm exploring open sourcing my main project which I built with this system. I'd love to share it one day!

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conception an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People are building software for themselves.

	▲	jvanderbot 30 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Correct. I've started recording what I've built (here https://jodavaho.io/posts/dev-what-have-i-wrought.html ), and it's 90% for myself. The long tail of deployable software always strikes at some point, and monetization is not the first thing I think of when I look at my personal backlog. I also am a tmux+claude enjoyer, highly recommended.
	▲	hinkley 39 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I’ve known too many developers and seen their half-assed definition of Done-Done. I actually had a manager once who would say Done-Done-Done. He’s clearly seen some shit too.

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haolez an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The influencers generate noise, but the progress is still there. The real productivity gains will start showing up at market scale eventually.

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verdverm an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

There are dozens and dozens of these submitted to Show HN, though increasingly without the title prefix now. This one doesn't seem any more interesting than the others.

	▲	schipperai 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I picked up a number things from others sharing their setup. While I agree some aspects of these are repetitive (like using md files for planning), I do find useful things here and there.

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nferraz an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I liked the way how you bootstrap the agent from a single markdown file.

	▲	schipperai 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I built so much muscle memory from the original system, so it made sense to apply it to other projects. This was the simplest way to achieve that