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How I Code with a Team of AI Agents

Use AI agents effectively by splitting work into independent tasks, mapping dependencies, providing focused project context, and keeping one person responsible for integration and review.

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I use a team of AI agents by giving each one a bounded, independent task, making dependencies explicit, and keeping one coordinator responsible for integration and review. The goal is not to delegate every step or maximize the number of agents; it is to make useful work happen in parallel without losing control of the result.

Start with the outcome, not the agent count

Before assigning work, define the end state: what should change, what must stay unchanged, and what evidence will show the task is done. A useful assignment names both a deliverable and its acceptance criteria. For example, ask an agent to investigate a failing test and return the likely cause, relevant files, and a proposed fix—not simply to “look at the tests.”

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Keep small actions and tightly dependent steps in the main workflow. Delegation has a coordination cost: someone must understand the output, reconcile it with other work, and check it. Adding agents is worthwhile only when their separate work can make progress without creating more integration work than it saves.

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Choose tasks that can actually run in parallel

Split work by independent question or deliverable. OpenAI’s multi-agent documentation recommends independent tasks with clear questions and expected results, and gives examples such as reviewing separate documents or investigating different causes of a failure. OpenAI’s multi-agent guidance also cautions that agents editing the same files need to coordinate.

  • Good candidates: investigate separate failure hypotheses, review different documents, or implement isolated changes with clearly separated files or interfaces.
  • Usually sequential: work that depends on a decision, completed migration, or interface another task has not yet established.
  • High-overlap work: multiple agents changing the same files or shared interfaces. Split the work differently, assign one editor, or agree on ownership and integration points first.

Make the dependency map before dispatching. OpenAI’s account of Symphony describes a task graph in which agents start on unblocked work and wait when prerequisites remain. That is an orchestration example, not a rule that every project needs a task-graph system. The useful principle is simpler: start independent work now, and do not ask a downstream worker to guess at an unfinished prerequisite. OpenAI’s Symphony article

Give agents enough shared project context

Each agent needs the relevant repository structure, conventions, constraints, and commands for its assignment. Put stable, recurring guidance in the instruction-file format supported by the coding-agent harness rather than copying a long project briefing into every prompt. For a one-off task, include the specific files, boundaries, and expected output directly.

Do not treat repository instructions as correct merely because they exist. The VS Code customization guide recommends starting from a recurring observed problem, recording a baseline, making the smallest useful customization, and checking whether it applies. In practice, test the instructions against a representative task and adjust them when agents repeatedly miss the same convention. VS Code’s agent customization guide

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Keep one integrator accountable for the result

One coordinator—often the developer directing the work—should collect results, resolve conflicts, and verify the combined change against the original success criteria. Separate investigation, implementation, and review when those are genuinely independent jobs; do not assume that an agent’s completion message is proof that the change works.

  1. Assign: give each worker a bounded task, relevant context, and a concrete deliverable.
  2. Track: record prerequisites and wait on work that depends on an unfinished decision or change.
  3. Integrate: inspect outputs, reconcile overlapping edits, and combine compatible changes.
  4. Verify: run the project’s relevant checks and compare the final result with the stated acceptance criteria.
  5. Review: have a human approve repository changes before they are treated as ready.

For orchestration, code-driven control is useful when predictable sequencing, cost, or performance matters; model-directed decisions can be useful when planning needs flexibility. The approaches can be combined, and neither is a universal default. OpenAI Agents SDK orchestration guide

Choose a setup by its tradeoffs

There is no evidence-backed universal best number of agents or fixed role chart. Compare a setup against the work in front of you:

  • Task independence: Can each worker make progress without another agent’s output?
  • File overlap: Are agents likely to edit the same files, interfaces, or shared resources?
  • Context isolation: Does a focused context help each worker reason about a separate problem?
  • Coordination burden: Can someone review and merge the outputs without spending more effort than the parallel work saves?
  • Execution control: Is flexible planning acceptable, or does the work require a fixed, deterministic sequence?
  • Permissions and review: What can an agent read or change, and who approves the result?

OpenAI’s Responses multi-agent guidance notes that parallel delegation can help with independent research, analysis, or implementation, but additional agents can increase token use and be less useful when tasks are dependent, share mutable resources, or require a fixed execution graph. OpenAI’s Responses multi-agent guide

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Set permissions and preserve human review

Limit what an automated workflow can change to the permissions it needs. GitHub describes Agentic Workflows as read-only by default, with writes restricted to validated outputs, and says to “Keep human review in the loop.” Treat that as guidance from GitHub’s documentation, not an independent outcome study. GitHub Agentic Workflows documentation

GitHub’s documentation names GitHub Copilot, Anthropic Claude, OpenAI Codex, and Google Gemini as supported engines, each with engine-specific authentication. OpenAI describes Codex as usable across ChatGPT, an editor, and a terminal. These are examples of available options, not a comparative ranking of quality or suitability. OpenAI Codex

What a practical team workflow looks like

Suppose a bug report points to a failing feature but the cause is unclear. One agent can trace the failure path and report likely causes; another can inspect relevant tests and identify missing coverage. If the fix depends on which cause is confirmed, hold implementation until the investigation is integrated. Then assign a bounded fix, ask for the changed files and checks performed, and have the coordinator inspect and test the result.

If both agents need to alter the same implementation file, they are not working independently in any useful sense. Give the file to one agent and ask the other for a review or a test proposal instead. The division of labor should follow the dependency and file boundaries, not an arbitrary set of titles such as “planner,” “coder,” and “tester.”

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What the evidence does—and does not—show

The official documentation supports practical guidance on task independence, orchestration, context, permissions, and review. It does not establish a general performance statistic showing that teams of coding agents are faster or more effective across projects. Vendor-hosted customer claims, where present, are testimonials rather than independent comparative evidence. Judge the approach against your own task’s quality criteria and integration cost.

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