My agentic coding setup [April 2026]
Occasionally I'll scroll Twitter and see people claiming they run 10+ coding agents simultaneously.
I'm genuinely curious how they're pulling this off. Is this actually their workflow, or is it performative?
As a former professional software engineer, it’s insane just how much the profession has changed in the past 2 years, and especially in the past few months. I've been experimenting heavily with (semi) long-running coding agents lately, and my current max is around 5 concurrent agents. There are two big bottlenecks:
My own mental context window. I could be using an orchestrator agent with a kanban board to manage those agents, but I actually want to be hands on with the business logic. After 5 agents, I can no longer keep track of what's going on. Possibly a skill issue.
My current codebases aren't big enough for that many agents to work discrete features without bumping into each other and causing merge conflicts.
My current setup: Conductor running agents from both Codex (GPT 5.4) and Claude Code (Opus 4.6, using the Gstack setup (thanks Garry Tan)).
I opted to use Gstack rather than building out many of my own Skills because I’m probably not going to put in the cycles to maintain them just for myself, and I’m personally probably better off deferring to the best practices built up by the community.
A few things I've found genuinely useful along the way:
Gstack forces clarifying questions upfront, which has saved me from a lot of wasted cycles. I wish this was the default for coding agents - force more clarifying questions, so that the agents don’t try to overcomplicate every feature.
The /office-hours skill pretty neat
As much as I like iTerm + Tmux, Conductor is a level up for managing agents. The sandboxing makes it much easier to manage multiple sessions.
As for the quality of the code actually generated, it’s not terrible. I still toss out a significant amount of code, and refactor frequently, but it’s all workable. I rarely if ever find myself editing code by hand, which is pretty different from one year ago, back when I was using Cursor.
It's still very much a work in progress and I fully anticipate changing things as the space evolves on a daily basis.