Running more than one agent, or one agent for a long time, adds coordination work of its own. These articles cover parallel agents without overwritten changes, handing unfinished work to another agent, when parallel runs cost more than they save, breaking a fix-break-fix loop, and keeping retries and model choice from inflating costs.
5 articles
How to attribute coding agent spend to tasks and attempts, tell useful retries from wasted ones, match the model to each step without weakening verification, and judge the result by cost per accepted change.
Why a coding agent can fix one failure and bring back another, how to record each attempt, when to stop patching and investigate one hypothesis, and what to leave so the loop does not return.
Parallel agents overlap their run time, not your prompting, questions, review and merging. Sort tasks by independence, size sessions to your review capacity, and compare serial and parallel batches on end-to-end time and rework.
Freeze the unfinished diff in a commit, record which checks passed, failed or never ran, and label every other claim as observed, inferred or decided, so the receiving agent re-checks what it inherits and errors can be traced to the…
Give each agent its own worktree and branch, separate the ports, databases and containers a worktree still shares, agree file ownership and merge order up front, and test the combined result.
