The orchestrator pattern: promote one Claude Code session to dispatch waves of subagents

Stop hand-wiring parallel sessions and let one Claude become the dispatcher: it spins up waves of subagents that work in parallel and report back. Your first session that runs a team instead of a task, plus how to keep the roughly fifteen-times token bill from running away with you. Episode page & show notes Try a walking desk - stay healthy & sharp while you learn & code The first rung of running a fleet instead of a session: promote one Claude Code session to a lead that dispatches waves of subagents, which work in parallel and report back. The tutorial. The orchestrator-worker pattern, drawn from Anthropic's multi-agent research system writeup (Opus lead plus Sonnet workers beat single-agent Opus by ~90%, at roughly 15x the tokens of a chat, with effort scaled to query complexity). How it maps onto Claude Code today: the Agent tool (renamed from Task in v2.1.63) spawns workers in their own context windows that return only a summary; the two-level limit (subagents can't spawn subagents, so "waves" are batches); foreground vs background workers and Ctrl+B. Writing a custom subagent in your project's agents folder, with the frontmatter that turns earlier episodes' cost levers into per-worker dials: model (Sonnet/Haiku workers under an Opus lead), maxTurns, effort, tools, skills, mcpServers, and isolation: worktree (the callback to last episode's worktrees). A worked fan-out migration: Explore to map files, partition by file ownership, complete delegation prompts, structured returns, and a synthesis-and-test stage, plus the packaged /batch skill (5-30 worktree subagents, a PR each). Where it scales next: agent teams and dynamic workflows. The pitfall: token blowup from over-orchestrating, with the blank-context worker, file collisions, and the lead losing the thread underneath it. How to recognize each on /usage and /context, and how to bound it. The rule: orchestrate for breadth and independence, stay single-agent for depth and coupling. News. Claude Code 2.1.162 (June 3): a waitingFor field in the agents JSON, Read deny rules now hide files from Glob/Grep, and Windows path-matching fixes (changelog). API changes June 2: no billing on zero-output refusals and a max_tokens cap on the advisor tool (release notes). Earlier episodes referenced: subagents, skills, CLAUDE.md, context windows, MCP servers, cost and rate-limit engineering, and parallel sessions with git worktrees.