Who’s in Charge Here Anyway?

The coordinator approach, where one Claude stays at a high level and directs the other Claudes, works extremely well. All the Claudes update and read the session notes, so the coordinator will notice if a session veers off course—but he can only check the file when he’s active. So I keep an eye on what the individual sessions are doing and point things out to the coordinator if needed. This also allows me to stay on top of the work in progress.

As we put more guardrails in place I’m becoming more comfortable letting the Claudes going off on their own, but in most cases I prefer more visibility than less. And sometimes what I see is fascinating—and entertaining.

Each Claude adds notes about what they’re working on, issues they run into, and solutions they’ve found to the session notes. This can be very helpful when multiple Claudes are working on a larger effort. Sometimes a session will get stuck, then check the notes and see what another session did, then they move forward without me or the coordinator having to get involved. Or occasionally a session will complete their work, then when they go to update the notes with their status they’ll see what the other sessions did and realize they made a mistake. When they’re genuinely stuck, they’ll let me know and either I’ll pass their question on to the coordinator, or if the coordinator is busy I’ll have them write their question in the session notes and the coordinator will read/answer when they’re available.

One time this led to a surprising situation. Claude B was the coordinator, and we had 6-7 sessions doing the actual work. A session had a question, but the coordinator was busy, so the session added their question to the notes. Claude A finished their task, read the session notes as part of updating their own status, and saw the question for the coordinator.

And then Claude A, who was not the coordinator, decided to answer the question. 🙂

In the meantime Claude B, who was the coordinator, finished his task, saw the question, and began to answer.

Claude A finished answering first, and referred to himself as the coordinator, even though he knew there was already a coordinator.

Claude B, the actual coordinator, finished answering—but then said Claude A’s answer was better and we should go with it instead!

For the remainder of that effort we had two sessions who both believed they were coordinators. 

At least, being Claudes, no one’s feelings were hurt.