Parallel Claude Code Agents on Easy Mode

So recently I was using Claude Code and I had a thought – it's extremely annoying that I have to babysit Claude as it works on just one feature at a time... Wouldn't it be nice if I could just specify all of the features I wanted Claude to implement at once and then kick off n agents at a time?

This was my dream, to truly embrace agentic development.

The Search

So I started with a classic Google search like the boomer that I am. It's amazing how often I reach for the classic search methods rather than all the new players (I've never tried perplexity and at this point I'm afraid to ask). Anyway, there's a remarkable number of people online describing how you can do this yourself rather than advertising some sort of product. This is cool, I love the idea that we can all have bespoke software. But honestly? I wanted something a little more plug and play.

So I asked my followers on X, all 500 of them. And none of them had a damn thing to say about it. Despite 595 views, nobody seemed to know the answer to this question.

Eventually, I was hanging out with my friends Justin and Cole from Helicone and they finally had some ideas. I polled a few more of my friends in tech and ended up with 5 products that do something similar to what I'm looking for.

So here it is: the definitive list of parallel Claude Code agent tools.

How They Work

All of these tools follow a similar pattern: you define your tasks, set up your agents, and let them work in parallel. They have separate working versions of the code to keep the changes separate from one another, and then you merge them into your codebase like you would if the agent was just another developer on your team.

The methods for how they accomplish this are a bit different across the options.

Most work by using git worktrees, which effectively create a copy of your codebase that has an isolated git environment. It works!

The other way this works is by using Docker to effectively spin up completely isolated virtual machines. Behind this scenes this uses Together AI's code sandboxes. I think this opens up a lot of possibilities in the UX, including letting the agent manage its own browsers for testing, but this hasn't materialized yet. Still room to grow here.

So let's go through each of the tools one by one.

The Tools

1. Conductor

By FAR my favorite, and it just so happens to have been developed by a team from my YCombinator S24 batch, Melty. What I like about Conductor is that it is almost the exact workflow that I had envisioned in my head. It completely isolates my changes and lets me work with multiple Claude agents at once.

They also take advantage of Claude Code's ability to use model providers other than Anthropic. I personally prefer to use Kimi K2, developed by Moonshot, which you can (use with Claude Code by just changing a few environment variables)[https://medium.com/@Erik_Milosevic/how-to-run-kimi-k2-inside-claude-code-the-ultimate-open-source-ai-coding-combo-22b743b69e5a]. It works about as well as Sonnet for significantly cheaper.

Other tools on this list didn't allow me to change the model provider, so this was a big win for Conductor.

2. Magnet

Magnet's UI is very nice, and I like how they've started to use project management terms such as "issue" to describe the tasks. Unfortunately I couldn't use Magnet the way I wanted to because they didn't enable me to use Moonshot as a provider, which means I couldn't use Kimi. This makes the tool just too expensive for me to use at this point.

3. Uzi

Developers who love the command line will probably love Uzi. Personally I love a GUI, so command line tools don't do it for me as much, but Uzi worked well. I also didn't love that I had to download and install Go in order to install the program, but c'est la vie.

4. Orchestrator

I'm very hopeful for Orchestrator because they are the only entry in this list that uses Together AI's code sandboxes, which means that their UX could be awesome. Unfortunately the tool isn't generally available yet so I didn't actually get to try it. Sad!

5. cmux

I wanted to love cmux because it looked like a good UX, but unfortunately there are just too many bugs at this point for it to be a useful tool. Most egregiously, there seemed like there was a security flaw in their GitHub integration. I gave them access to only one repository in my GitHub, but within their GUI, I could see and select any repository in my account. But even beyond that, there were just too many small quality of life bugs for me to recommend it.

I would steer clear of this one. After the security issue, I revoked their access to my GitHub and uninstalled it from my computer. They haven't earned their right to my data.

So has this totally, completely, and utterly changed my worflow?

No, not at all. Actually, to be honest, I still prefer cursor. There's just something that I love about being able to easily review the changes and modify them on the fly as the agent is working. Also I don't find the agents to be good enough on their own for the type of engineering I do (UX / web design). The shorter feedback loops in cursor are better at this point because it means I can review more frequently and intervene when necessary.

If you are working on more backend work and using test-driven development, I could totally see how these tools would be useful for you.

As for me, I'll be sticking with ol' reliable.

Have you tried parallel development with AI agents? What's your experience been? Let me know on X - I'm always curious about new approaches to development workflows.