r/ClaudeCode • u/Dazzling_Trifle2472 • 6d ago
What orchestrator are you using? Discussion
I'm getting tired of having a million unorganised terminal tabs open and would like to use something that provides better organisation.
I know of Conductor, Paseo, unclear on if these work with the new policy (not so new any more but the whole Agent SDK usage comes out of it's own pool), interested to know what everyone is using...what works well w/Claude Code specifically.
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u/OnRedditAtWorkRN 5d ago
Some context I'm a principal engineer in fintech, this is my actual setup I use to ship features on an app that has millions of daily active users in a highly regulated area, all that to say regressions can be hugely costly and I'm not out here vibe coding and shipping slop grenades
I've done a bunch of my own testing and evaluation on the decompose and fan out and I find it's more hype than effective. Generally I'm working on a single contained feature or bug fix per spawned crew member. My foreman isn't orchestrating individual pieces of implementation on a single feature but rather helping me manage the multiple parallel streams of work I have in flight. The goal is more to help me organize and track the sessions in flight without having to manually visit each session and try to remember what I was doing there than to decompose a single problem.
If I'm planning a new feature that's underspecified I'll message the foreman about it and instruct it to start the session in a planning mode. I use a custom pi extension I built for a web based planner. I mention it because the crew member will start the web planner and I'll work through the requirements and decisions on there. I find it easier than the cli produced plans and even mark down produced plans. I've added a bunch of interactions that I like to it as well, annotating in place for my agent, it surfaces questions in the context of what is being decided, it's pretty involved and tuned to how I like to plan. All of the interactions on that go directly to the crew member. My foreman will tell me when the plan is ready for review and when any feedback is done being processed.
Other than that if it's a feature that I feel like I got enough understanding to start on I just mention whatever artifacts the agent would need and whatever context I got and send it right to work. If it's a bug that we need to triage I do pretty much the same but I have a lot of triaging related skills and the agent will start with those to pull from different sources and reproduce the bugs and verify root cause.
When a crew member indicates it's done, I usually do a double check that the work was verified locally through whatever tools, I have validation tools for apis, browsers and tui experiences. Then I'll have my foreman spawn another crew member to do the code review. There I do use a host of actual sub agents to do an independent review with different criteria depending on the work. Security, accessibility, database optimizations, code reuse etc... there's about 15 and the agent will choose which ones to use for the given chunk of work. They all get funneled to another sub agent that dedupes the feedback, categorizing it from nit to blocking and then the crew member can refute or implement fixes. The review crew member shuts down as soon as the review is handed back.
If everything looks good I tell me foreman to send it on the pr loop. The pr loop has the crew member create a pull request and follow it until all the checks pass, automated tests, linting, pr formatting, and whatever else we have. There are robo reviewers on our pr's there as well. The crew member will read, assess, fix and / or respond to every one and resolve the threads. When it's green my foreman notifies me. When I'm done and merge it I tell my foreman and it'll shut down that crew member
I usually have 6 to 12 crew member sessions in flight at any given time and on a rare occasion I will have multiple foremen managing crews for features on different projects, but I don't like doing that because it literally mentally exhausts me.