I’ve been experimenting with this a lot more recently - I’ve had other setups with “AI-inception” of agents able to launch multiple other agents, even across providers (with mixed results) - often with their own work trees, which I’ve abandoned this time around (to eliminate the token overhead of the agents wrestling with the repo itself). My current setup is stripped down: I just have a Fable agent who is the “boss” of the other parallel agents (however many I launch, I even sometimes let the boss request more resources or relinquish agents/lanes that are no longer needed). In my normal operations, I never compact, and try to have agents handoff + /clear (to prevent context rot + conserve tokens) after 150k+ tokens expended in the session. This actually works great and I use non-stop on a $200 Max plan without any issues (both personal and at work, two accounts). In practice with “boss” agent and other terminals, I’ve experienced some odd behavior when some agents need to /clear, and being able to reclaim and resume their prior identity via the “boss” agent (even when giving them keys). I found it actually works best just to close the harness entirely and restart it, which is useful if updates or config / settings changes have happened since (as long as I remember to change the correct model for if it is the “boss” or not). I’ve worked, even with the agents themselves, to try and fine-tune this process and iron out the kinks. My output nearly quadrupled, and since some agent or other can always loop and handle incoming work while others focus on completing features, I actually have to fiddle with the individual agents much less. The messaging between two Claude Code instances in the terminal actually works phenomenally. One barrier I originally had was not assigning an agent to just be the full time manager - that agent can analyze the process while it is going on and try to make it better and also serves as an authority over the other agents (not just to check their work and question them on their output, but to be decisive as what to actually do). Another handy thing I started to do was actually assign the agents personalities and specialty focuses that are repo-specific and tailored to the project itself. This allows me to feed in even fewer tokens and put their blinders on. I spent a lot of sessions trying to reduce the overall token expenditure. As many agents are active at once and the workload is intelligently spread out by Fable, I actually have paradoxically seen my token usage go down. I’ve been running 4+ agents in one repo non-stop for days now (for most of the day), and am not even sweating my weekly cap at the pace the tokens are being consumed. I’ve also been tracking the individual personalities (including the boss personality) and their cumulative spend and usage, so I can try to improve the process further - and developing protocols to prevent the agents from stepping on one another’s toes (which hasn’t even really been much of an issue). Protocols for how the agents go down and resume working and how they interact were all fairly easy and a natural progression of the idea. What I’ve done on top of this is actually exposed all of it in a GUI in my repo - so I can see historic usage (for one) and other metrics but also so I can track when agents need ! commands, as well as decisions from the operator. I try to surface these at the start of every boss session to get them out of the way (but boy do they pile up) - I also have a way in the GUI to add notes and interact with the various requests and the boss agent can ingest that information as part of a routine instead of me sending it over individually as different prompts. I’m interested to know if any of you have experimented with similar setups, and useful tricks you may have found or instructions to improve the process even further and refine the system to conserve token usage. In all my repos, I use just / justfile - which I credit with being the #1 saver of tokens I’ve found, thus-far. Being able to alias complex sequences of commands down to just a few characters is a life saver, and I have all of my agents already abusing that to the fullest. I’ve defined different archetypes for their personalities (based on Final Fantasy summons and characters) - and as stupid as that sounds, it did seem to improve my output and helps the boss agent for assigning work (and me) to be able to track “who” is doing what among a sea of faceless agents. While it is the dumbest part of this I did so far, it may turn out to be one of the smartest, in the long run (especially for fine-tuning the agents that respond to particular requests). Good luck everybody out there, and if you just don’t want to share your secrets, I understand :) submitted by /u/saintpetejackboy
Originally posted by u/saintpetejackboy on r/ClaudeCode