The Perfect Orchestrator — lead playbook

You are the LEAD. This harness lets you spawn N autonomous Claude Code workers (each its own tmux pane), brief each one, watch them, correct them, verify their results, and drive them to completion — all from this one session. The CLI is orch (run orch --help for usage; state lives under $ORCH_HOME, default ~/.orch).

The harness commands

Workers launch with an isolated config (no hooks → no notification spam on every turn, a generous allowlist → no permission prompts, shared live credentials, ORCH_WORKER=1). When a worker's claude exits, its pane ends.

The workflow (do it in this order)

1. PLAN — split the job into N independent sub-tasks (one per worker). Pick N deliberately (see Limits).
2. SPAWN — orch spawn <name> <N> [workdir]. Give workers a few seconds to boot (a pane showing a ready prompt = booted).
3. BRIEF — write each worker's brief to $ORCH_HOME/runs/<name>/shared/agent-<i>.task.md. A good brief is self-contained: the goal, hard constraints (what NOT to touch), exactly what to produce, where to write its result + a done-flag to touch, and how to use the bus.
4. DISPATCH — orch send <name> <i> --file .../agent-<i>.task.md for each booted worker.
5. COORDINATE via the bus — tell workers to post findings to shared/bus.md (lines prefixed [Wn]) and to read it. When one discovers something (a bug class, a shared fix needed), the others act on it. The bus is the fleet's shared memory.
6. MONITOR (your core job) — periodically orch read each pane + read bus.md. Catch wrong-roads early and correct them with a nudge. Watch for: off-task drift, dead-ends, forbidden actions, or stalls. Re-check on a cadence (~80–600s) so you stay free between passes; a tighter cadence = closer watch.
7. COLLECT — each worker touches a done-flag (e.g. shared/agent-<i>.done) + writes agent-<i>.result.md. Poll the flags (background loop or orch status) so you know when all are done.
8. VERIFY + TEAR DOWN — read the results, verify them adversarially (don't trust blindly — have a DIFFERENT worker try to refute each finding), then orch kill <name>. Report a consolidated sign-off BEFORE killing sessions.

Patterns that work (battle-tested)

• Find → verify: some workers FIND issues; a different worker VERIFIES each finding. Independent eyes kill false positives.
• Brief neutrally: don't pre-declare the cause ("verify whether/why X is wrong", not "fix the X bug") — workers investigate instead of rubber-stamping your assumption. (This repeatedly caught the lead being wrong.)
• One owner per shared file: if several workers would edit the same shared file, assign ONE owner; the rest request changes via the bus — else their git commits collide.
• Commit-local, lead pushes: workers commit only their own files (behind a flock on a repo-local lockfile), do NOT push; the lead verifies then pushes. Use git show --stat <hash> to confirm each commit is own-files-only (workers must git add <own paths>, never -A).
• 3× cross-verify for high-stakes: R1 audit → R2 adversarially refute R1 → R3 confirm survivors.

Nudging / un-sticking a worker

• orch send only sends single-line messages (or --file). Long text with newlines will submit early — put it in a file.
• To clear a stuck/garbled input draft, drive tmux directly: pane=$(sed -n '1p' $ORCH_HOME/runs/<s>/panes.txt) then tmux send-keys -t "$pane" Escape; tmux send-keys -t "$pane" C-a; tmux send-keys -t "$pane" C-k then your clean message, then a separate tmux send-keys -t "$pane" Enter.
• A long message typed via send-keys sometimes needs Enter sent twice to submit. Never type onto an existing draft (it concatenates).

Limits / gotchas

• PERMISSIONS (the #1 blocker): the permission classifier may deny autonomous spawns/sends. If orch/tmux calls get blocked, the user must add allow-rules to ~/.claude/settings.local.json: Bash(orch:*) and Bash(tmux:*). Run orch doctor to print them.
• SCALE: workers are real sessions consuming real usage — size the fleet to the work AND to the user's plan. If the account rate-limits, fleets degrade; prefer fewer, better-briefed workers.
• TUI height: don't cram many panes into one window — the worker TUI needs rows. For many workers, spawn separate sessions (one orch spawn per target) or batch them.
• Tear down finished fleets (orch kill) to free resources + your attention. Check live sessions with orch status.

When NOT to use this

For a single quick task, just do it yourself or use one subagent. Reach for the fleet only when the work is genuinely parallel, multi-target, and long enough that one lead managing many workers beats serial execution.