How We Work: Working with Multiple Agents in Parallel
By Milkana Brace
This is Part 2 of our How We Work series — short reflections from the SageOx team on the tools, techniques, and mental models behind our workflows.
Working with Multiple Agents in Parallel
Transcript
Milkana: I know that earlier on, you had up to 50 agents working for you in parallel, which is insane. I cannot even imagine how that works. And you mentioned that more recently, you have been working with fewer agents. Curious to know why — what was different then, what is different now? Is that more a function of the type of work you're doing and the maturity of the product, or is that more a function of things you've learned that make you more efficient?
Ryan: A combination of things. I think early on, even when Opus 4.5 came out, it was much more effective if you had lots of agents spun up — even if they were stomping on each other. Because at the end of the day, it's really about outcome. How quickly can you get to your outcome? As a human, it's okay if these agents rewrite things multiple times. It does not matter if they're having merge conflicts. It's not like the same irritation that you would get with engineers on your team if you were giving them the same thing. And it's really fine to throw stuff out.
So I think at that point in time, it was just way easier to unleash a whole bunch of agents, even if they're stomping on each other, with a set of epics and Beads and everything, and then come back and check on it in an hour and see where it was at.
I think now, with Conductor and with just improvements in Claude itself, you don't need as many agents to get the same outcome in the same amount of time. And plus, you don't have the stomping effect as well. So I think that's an important thing.
And then, again, if you can have a lot of these going in parallel, even if some of it's not quite as fast, you don't have to spin up quite as many agents — and that's okay.
I also feel like Claude has gotten much better at understanding dependencies if you're using Beads — like what should be in what order. So it almost makes it a little harder to spin up as many agents, which is actually a good thing. They would only spin up like six or ten or fifteen, whatever it was. Or the team would only spin up so many. Because it's much more thoughtful about the ordering, so that these merge conflicts and stomping on each other doesn't happen.
We'll be sharing more of what we're learning as we go. Expect other interviews and takeaways. Drop us a note if you'd like a specific topic covered: feedback@sageox.ai.