Anthropic upgrades Claude Code Projects to run parallel AI workers

Boris from the team here. Projects are how I write pretty much all my code these days. Happy to answer any questions.

The motivation for building the new coordinator is: as people get more comfortable using Claude Code, we noticed they start running more agents in parallel — Claude works, so you start another thread to work on the next thing. As the model gets smarter and more token-efficient, and as features like auto mode and cloud let agents run longer, this has become more and more common. You can do a lot of work in parallel this way. But the longer you multi-Claude this way, the more it feels like the UX is not good enough: it is hard to manage the complexity and context switch. It feels bad to fragment your attention like that.

At the same time, sometimes you want to deeply focus on a single task, and go back and forth on it without switching your attention to something else. Not every kind of work needs parallelization. This kind of single threaded focus remains really important.

The solution we came up with is coordinators. You do your work in Projects, then talk to your project’s coordinator, which then delegates work to threads when needed. Threads run in parallel and bubble up information and questions to the main thread. You can also jump into a thread to do deep work.

If you’ve tried it, we’d love to hear what you think. If you haven’t, give it a spin and please share feedback on what we can do to make it better for your use case (run /bug or make a GitHub issue).

I've spent the last two building almost exactly this for fun at $DAYJOB, the todo list becomes individual threads with proactive comms. As I was building it, it was teaching me why there were some architectural choices in Gastown[1] that I was tilting my head at about back when it came out.

I've built half versions of it many times this year never getting the flow right.

Today I cracked the todo list led development where I was just adding ideas as streams of thought and if a thought was relevant to a repo I have a 'keeper' for each microservice who is the expert in answering questions and implementing features in its own domain. They live for forever and self compact if necessary but my coordinator session becomes chaos. I need to filter out the interactions I have with it to only relevant signals. At the moment I have them chatting back and forth and trying to keep up with them is intense.

My long term idea is that programs become living organisms where the agents live side by side to the code and running apps, receiving feedback from outside the system and implementing features and restarting and deploying itself with watchdogs. I had a lot of fun with it today.

My biggest issue is that the coordinator comes back to me with a question about an idea or feature that I had thought of an hour ago and it needs to refresh me on my own thoughts...

[1] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

The change from no moat -> a really big moat is the the migration of more and more coding to the cloud.

The more of your development setup is running in the cloud, I think it will be really hard to justify leaving. Certainly the cloud will for the next couple years be cheaper (credits, economies of scale etc).

So this only works in anthropic cloud?

I started feeling the push last month with the free cloud-only credits.

With Nvidia's GPUs now under control, open weight producing buyers are crippled.

Anthropic is turning the screws.

Claude creates my productivity. It's hosted centrally by a single company. Now it's pushing to control my execution environment, too.

I hope anthropic employees think about the long term destruction of individual agency they're pushing.

The agent must represent the individual, not the organization.

What future do you want?

Can somebody please find a better link for this?

Edit: ok, I switched the URL from https://alphasignal.ai/news/anthropic-upgrades-claude-code-p... to what looks like the original announcement. If there's newer information not covered there, we can change the URL again, but I'd prefer a link to something intelligible.

I’ve been doing this in my Intent [0] system for a while now. A word of caution, Intent is not for everyone. :) It focusses a lot on guardrails and controls and what I call “critics”, that are concerned with code quality and using correct idioms, so #ymmv. But it does have a complete Multi-Agent framework that has served me pretty well for the last (almost) 12 months or so since I moved from a single-agent to multi-agent workflow.

[0]: https://intent.laksa.io/

Sounds like a great way to automatically increase API usage by a lot and drain customers of money

So, I'm a bit curious what the point of this is.

I currently simply use claude code on fable 5.2 as 'head-orch' and have it spawn up Opus high suborchs, then the suborchs use a custom mcp for spawning codex/antigravity/deepseek/z.ai etc agents.

Right now I have 10+ suborchs running up to 20 sub sub workers each as sol 6.1 high workers.

github issues for work tracking/assignment + worktrees and prs to prevent collision. So far its working very well. How do claude code projects improve on this?

Interesting that the default coordinator is opus low and thread subagents are opus high. Some folks have been saying they do a fable orchestrator to a qwnen subagent, and this seems to be the inverse (cheaper coordinator, more expensive subagent).

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Only a few more Silly CON valley moats to pillage, and Claude does everything!

One subscription to rule them all, as long you're nice to Claude...

What a time to be alive, couldn't think of a nicer group of people to give my money to.